Spain’s 1939 Exiles in the Americas and Maryland: Eighty Years, Alive in Our Hearts 9783968693255

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SPAIN’S 1939 EXILES IN THE AMERICAS AND MARYLAND Eighty Years: Alive in our Hearts José María Naharro-Calderón (ed.)

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La Casa de la Riqueza Estudios de la Cultura de España 67

E

l historiador y filósofo griego Posidonio (135-51 a.C.) bautizó la Península Ibérica como «La casa de los dioses de la riqueza», intentando expresar plásticamente la diversidad hispánica, su fecunda y matizada geografía, lo amplio de sus productos, las curiosidades de su historia, la variada conducta de sus sociedades, las peculiaridades de su constitución. Sólo desde esta atención al matiz y al rico catálogo de lo español puede, todavía hoy, entenderse una vida cuya creatividad y cuyas prácticas apenas puede abordar la tradicional clasificación de saberes y disciplinas. Si el postestructuralismo y la deconstrucción cuestionaron la parcialidad de sus enfoques, son los estudios culturales los que quisieron subsanarla, generando espacios de mediación y contribuyendo a consolidar un campo interdisciplinario dentro del cual superar las dicotomías clásicas, mientras se difunden discursos críticos con distintas y más oportunas oposiciones: hegemonía frente a subalternidad; lo global frente a lo local; lo autóctono frente a lo migrante. Desde esta perspectiva podrán someterse a mejor análisis los complejos procesos culturales que derivan de los desafíos impuestos por la globalización y los movimientos de migración que se han dado en todos los órdenes a finales del siglo xx y principios del xxi. La colección «La Casa de la Riqueza. Estudios de la Cultura de España» se inscribe en el debate actual en curso para contribuir a la apertura de nuevos espacios críticos en España a través de la publicación de trabajos que den cuenta de los diversos lugares teóricos y geopolíticos desde los cuales se piensa el pasado y el presente español. Consejo editorial: Dieter Ingenschay (Humboldt Universität, Berlin) Jo Labanyi (New York University) Fernando Larraz (Universidad de Alcalá de Henares) José-Carlos Mainer (Universidad de Zaragoza) Susan Martin-Márquez (Rutgers University, New Brunswick) José Manuel del Pino (Dartmouth College, Hanover) Joan Ramon Resina (Stanford University) Ulrich Winter (Philipps-Universität Marburg)

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SPAIN’S 1939 EXILES IN THE AMERICAS AND MARYLAND Eighty Years: Alive in our Hearts José María Naharro-Calderón (ed.)

Iberoamericana • Vervuert • 2022

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Cualquier forma de reproducción, distribución, comunicación pública o transformación de esta obra solo puede ser realizada con la autorización de sus titulares, salvo excepción prevista por la ley. Diríjase a CEDRO (Centro Español de Derechos Reprográficos) si necesita fotocopiar o escanear algún fragmento de esta obra (www.conlicencia.com;  91 702 19 70 / 93 272 04 47). © Iberoamericana, 2022 Amor de Dios, 1 – E-28014 Madrid Tel.: +34 91 429 35 22 © Vervuert, 2022 Elisabethenstr. 3-9 – D-60594 Frankfurt am Main Tel.: +49 69 597 46 17 [email protected] www.iberoamericana-vervuert.es ISBN 978-84-9192-296-4 (Iberoamericana) ISBN 978-3-96869-324-8 (Vervuert) ISBN 978-3-96869-325-5 (e-Book) Depósito legal: M-17053-2022 Diseño de cubierta: Rubén Salgueiros Imagen de cubierta: Zenobia Camprubí and Juan Ramón Jiménez. Washington D.C., 1945. Interiores: ERAI Producción Gráfica The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ISO 9706 Este libro está impreso íntegramente en papel ecológico sin cloro Impreso en España

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Keeping Spain’s Exiles in the Americas and Maryland: “Alive in our Hearts” (1939-1989-2019). University of Maryland. October 23-24, 2019.

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For My Flamenca Chant & My Art

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Table of Contents

Spain’s 1939 Exiles in the Americas and Maryland. Eighty Years: Alive in our Hearts José María Naharro-Calderón..................................................... 15 Transnational Spanish Exiles in Maryland and the Americas: From Zenobia Camprubí, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Pedro Salinas to the Present Remembering the Spain of the Pre-Exile: Juan Ramón Jiménez, MacKinlay Kantor and 1956 Anne Giller-Wilde......................................................................... 41 Forgotten Legacies: Verses from an Exile in (the) Feminine M.ª Luz Bort Caballero................................................................ 49 Memory and Resistance in the Exile Texts of María Teresa León Kathryn Taylor............................................................................... 67 Carmen de Zulueta: Creating and Recreating Memories as a Spanish Republican Woman through her USA Exile Nélida Devesa-Gómez.................................................................... 81 Manuel Durán and Roberto Ruiz: Exiled Writers in the USA María Gómez-Martín..................................................................... 95

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From Max Aub to El Mazucu: The Spanish Exile and its Legacy Rachel Linville.............................................................................. 111 Two Visions of the United States in the Fiction of Spanish Exiles in the 1940s: Manuel de la Sota and Pedro Salinas Ricardo F. Vivancos-Pérez............................................................. 127 An Exiled Basque Woman in the United States: Gender and Nation in Basque Girl (1940) by Mirim Isasi Iker González-Allende................................................................. 147 Juan Ramón Jiménez and Zenobia Camprubí in the USA: Between the Hard Rock of Ethics and the Wall of Aesthetics 1936-1939-1951 José María Naharro-Calderón..................................................... 167 Getting there: United States Contradictions, Mexico, and Popular Resistance Mexico, the United States and the Spanish Civil War: Diplomacy, Arms and Refugees Andreu Espasa................................................................................. 209 USA Hispanic Women Fighting Fascist Spain: Print Culture and Activism Montse Feu..................................................................................... 227 France: A Stepping Stone toward the Americas The Spanish Republican Exile in Host Literatures, from France to the USA: A Transnational Approach Zoraida Carandell........................................................................ 257 Film, Poetry and Music around the 1939 Spanish Refugees Portrayal of Displacement: A Spanish Civil War Film and the Propaganda Machine Anaïs Naharro-Murphy................................................................. 275

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Musical Itineraries of the 1939 Spanish Republican Exiles in the Americas “Itineraries.” From Exile to the Inner Voice Carlos José Martínez Fernández................................................. 283 Eyewitnesses of Spain’s 1939 Exile in the Americas: The Privilege of Time and our Heartful Debt A “Carabinero” ’s Tale of Survival: 1936-1945 Pierre Verdaguer............................................................................ 289 Francesc Torres Stephen Mansbach......................................................................... 313 Ah! Distance Francesc Torres.............................................................................. 315 Memorable People and Works from the New York Republican Exile in Oblivion Víctor Fuentes............................................................................... 323 A Conversation with Noam Chomsky Juan Uriagereka and José María Naharro-Calderón................. 341 The Contributors.............................................................................. 357

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Spain’s 1939 Exiles in the Americas and Maryland. Eighty Years: Alive in our Hearts José María Naharro-Calderón University of Maryland

In memoriam José Ramón Marra López, Graciela Palau-Nemes, Gonzalo Sobejano, María Elena Zelaya, all seeds of the 1939 Spanish Exile Hispanism in the USA and Maryland

Exile is a global, plural, and protean phenomenon that has touched every people and nation at one particular juncture of their history. Contemporaneously, it is identified by political forms of exclusion that banish sine die large groups of opponents, e.g., from the modern nation-states created after the liberal bourgeois revolutions. Exiles and diasporas are politically motivated, as well as humanly disastrous, and keep displacing millions of souls on every continent, coined as refugees by international conventions since 1922. These modern political banishments affected liberals democracies particularly during the rise

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of 20th-century totalitarianisms that led, among other conflicts, to the 1936-39 War in Spain that vanquished the democratic Second Spanish Republic1. A cataclysm in which modern historiography has unveiled its local and international military Italian Fascist and Nazi plotting roots, as well as the dismal Non-Intervention League of Nations policies and the USA arms embargo. In fact, the conflict anticipated the Second World Clash and other civil strifes that plagued most of the rest of the century, leaving over 50 million refugees. While Mexico’s open arms for about 30,000 Spanish refugees, contradicted its long standing closed immigration policies, USA administrations were particularly restrictive about the influx of Spanish exiles or other refugees, until the slight improvement through the cumbersome Displaced Persons Act of 1948. For Spanish refugees, among their half a million diaspora, USA numbers were marginal, somehow in line with earlier lesser immigration numbers from Spain, but this time, mostly representing academics, thinkers, artists, and professionals, backed by personal and institutional affidavits of support that could also circumvent the fluctuating 230 yearly Spanish entry quotas to the USA, set in 1930. Furthermore, ideologically left leanings backlashes undermined the exiles in the USA. For example, the Cold War type official crackdowns against those in favor of the Spanish Loyalists, or the chasms between Liberals and Stalinists versus the closed ranks among conservative pro-defenders of the Francoist usurpers. The rhetorical and physical repatriation to the USA of the ad hoc aid to Spain through the surviving volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (1936-1938), or the North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy’s offspring, the American Medical Bureau, was another spark that ignited pre McCarthyism against Spanish Republican proselites. The subsequent 1942 Joint Antifascist Refugee Committee, eventually fell prey to prison sentences in 1950 through the Committee for Un-American Activities and the red scare for refusing to surrender their records of support to Spanish refugee in France,

1

A plural conflict, I have coined, Guerra de las Españas: civil and regional clashes, an international war, and a conflict of classes…

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among them, survivors from Nazi extermination camps at the Walter B. Cannon Varsovie Hospital in Toulouse. Later, Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo’s sponsored disappearance of Basque politician Jesús de Galíndez in 1956, an FBI informant among his fellow refugees, the cover up of the affair, or the financing of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, were clear signs of the USA stand against any of the exiles’ liberating hopes. Nevertheless, several noted Feminists, and Human Rights advocates from progressive Spain, who had come to the forefront of public affairs in the wake of the 1933 universal voting rights, like former parliament deputy Victoria Kent, or journalists Constancia de la Mora and Isabel de Palencia, were examples of the exiles’ attempts to sway USA public opinion to support the removal of the dictatorship through the recently created Organization of United Nations. But a parallel diplomacy was taking place in which France’s more expeditious moves (border closure from March of 1946 to February of 1948) were systematically countered by Great Britain’s long standing Non-Intervention, and the United States’ lukewarm opposition to the Franco dictatorship. The Leader of the Free World systematically resisted intervening in what it considered a domestic matter where any Soviet influence could not be risked, while tempering its standoff policies: it eventually facilitated financial aid to the Franco regime, the lifting of the 1946 UN resolution boycotting the regime, the reinstatement of an ambassador in Spain (1950), and the signing of the Madrid accords on September 26, 1953 for the establishments of four USA military bases–one of them still open at Rota (Cádiz). These successive setbacks, corroborated by the admittance of Franco’s Spain to the UNESCO in 1953, and to the UN in 1955, or the visit of president Eisenhower to Madrid in 1959, forced the Spanish exiles to wait for the passing of the dictatorship and the return of liberties to Spain in 1977. All things considered, the vast network of USA institutions benefited from selective but solid group of exiles that upgraded, in the coattails of USA pan-Americanism, the prestige of Spanish language, literature and culture, and the Modernist Iberian and American legacies (Jiménez El modernismo). Some, like Francisco Ayala, had re-

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emigrated from Latin America, particularly from the intellectual hub at the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras, which later attracted other émigrés from Spain like Aurora de Albornoz or Ricardo Gullón. Overall, the prestige of this unique but non-exhaustive crop of Silver Age and younger intellectuals thrived and mingled on USA campuses, such as the Summer Spanish School at Middlebury, as well as film, scientific or artistic institutions. These supported them across the vast USA territories, away from the fascist transnational perils, besides the paradoxical official contradictions toward their democratic hopes. Journals such as Ibérica: for a Free Spain (1953-1974), edited by Victoria Kent and Louise Crane, which also supported a relief organization for Spanish exiles in France, Nancy Mc Donald’s Spanish Refugee Aid (1953-1977), and España libre (1939-1977) of the Sociedades Hispanas Confederadas, also displayed consistenly their antidictatorial barrage of ideas. The latter, regrouped in 1937 over two hundred popular Spanish antifascist diaspora cultural and mutual societies, gathered over 60,000 members, its working class authors and artists agitated the readers with articles, books, cartoons and/or plays, while more than $2,000,000 were collected for the support of Republican refugees, political prisoners and clandestine resistance in Spain. And Eliseo Torres & Sons was a referent as a Spanish bookstore and publisher. Meanwhile, other exiles contributed through the arts and letters, thanks to pre-war established educational contacts between Spain and the USA (Fuentes “Exiliados” 52-53). Notably, 1956 Literature Nobel recipient, Juan Ramón Jiménez, back from Cuba to Florida in 1939, after having acted, in 1936, as “honorary cultural attaché” in the USA, alongside his feminist companion, Zenobia Camprubí. In the Maryland area, they kept up their Political Poetics, from Washington D.C. to the University of Maryland [UMD] (1942-1951), while nurturing all along a relationship with progressive USA Vice President (1941-1945) and 1948 Third Party Presidential Candidate, Henry Wallace. Filmmaker Luis Buñuel was present at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) and Hollywood; Luis Quintanilla‘s drawings were prefaced by Ernest Hemingway; Surrealist artist Eugenio F. Granell, later celebrated for his paintings

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in postdictatorial Spain, taught literature; philosopher José Ferrater Mora was selected by Bryn Mawr College in the stream of the peace activist, Bertrand Russell; cellist Pau Casals was a frequent guest at the White House; or Josep Lluís Sert, one of the designers of the Republican pavilion for the 1937 Paris World Fair, became Dean of the Harvard School of Architecture. In Paris, a great many antifascist artists had displayed their aesthetic commitment to the Spanish Republic: from Alexander Calder’s Mercury Fountain, Eduardo Vicente’s Men in the Trenches, or other exiles like later U.S.S.R. refugee Alberto’s Spanish People Have a Road Leading to a Star, and Joan Miró, a key referent for the USA post war abstract expressionism, with his homage, The Reaper. These last two pieces vanished, as a potent metaphor for that exile. While ambassador Fernando de los Ríos vacated Spain’s legacy in Washington D.C., and joined the NYC New School, enriched by other European exiled intelligentsia, Picasso’s Guernica, also firstly exhibited in Paris, was brought over in 1939 by Spanish Prime Minister Juan Negrín, to lobby for the loyalist cause through the MOMA. It eventually remained there until its final journey to Madrid in 1981, as an emblem of the return of a handful of exiles and democracy to Spain. As a vivid example for this Republican saga, Negrín’s disciple, Severo Ochoa, was the 1959 Nobel Prize Laureate in Physiology, while NYU hired historian Nicolás Sánchez-Albornoz, the son of one of Negrín’s successors at the Republican helm: Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz (1962-1971). Ironically, Nicolás had fled from the Cuelgamuros concentration camp, set up to build the standing mausoleum (the Valley of the Fallen) I have coined The Un-Civil Mountain (Entre alambradas y exilio 363). The dictator, through his family’s conniving, defied until the second day of our meeting (Oct 24, 2019), and almost eternally, his exhumation, as a liberating moment for the memory rightfully sought, and owed, to all of these exiles and other victims: “an admirable wandering Numancia which prefers to fade away than accept defeat” (Luis Araquistain [qtd. in El exilio español 235]). This Symposium at UMD (Oct 23-24, 2019) was preceded by El exilio de las Españas de 1939 en las Américas: “¿Adónde fue la canción?” [Spain’s 1939 Exile in the Americas: Where Did the Song Go?] (Oct.

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18-20, 1989), which had coincided then with a more balanced diplomatic accord on the USA military bases in Spain. It was followed by “Los exilios de las Españas de 1939: Por sendas de la memoria” [1939 Exiles from Spain: Memory Seeds] (Oct 21, 1999). Finally, the present one bore the dictator’s remains transfer. Thus, these 1936-1939 displacements have kept an endless shining flame among a half a million potential hi-stories, some of which we have strived to highlight throughout the last three decades at UMD: a shelter to this most relevant Spanish diasporic presence in the Americas, the USA and Maryland.

The Symposium and this Volume The texts edited here and presented at the meeting were accompanied by a film series during the Fall of 2019 (Sept. 10-Nov. 19, 2019) at the Cultural Services of the Embassy of France, the Mexican Cultural Institute and Spain’s Cultural Office in Washington D.C.2 Both the film series and symposium were directed to the broadest possible audience across all the UMD College of Arts and Humanities and Graduate School (UG, Graduate students, faculty) as well as the general public. The Symposium could not have been possible without the decisive contributions by the UMD College of Arts and Humanities and Dean Bonnie Thornton-Hill, the Graduate School and Dean Steve Fetter, the Miller Center for Historical Studies and Dr. Karin 2

La nueve. Los olvidados de la victoria (2010) Alberto Marquardt; La guerre est finie (1966) Alain Resnais; El misterio Galíndez (2003) Gerardo Herrero; En el balcón vacío (1962) José Miguel García Ascot-María Luisa Elío; Refuge / Un peuple attend (1939) Jean-Paul Dreyfus / Jean-Paul Le Chanois; Beltenebros (1991) Pilar Miró; Visa al paraíso (2010) Lillian Lieberman; Soldados de Salamina (2003) David Trueba; Le Vernet d’Ariège: Photographies d’un camp (1996) Linda Ferrer-Roca. Many thanks to Dr. Nélida Devesa-Gómez (U of Maryland), Dr. Kathryn Taylor (Towson U), Lillian Lieberman, Anaïs NaharroMurphy, and my colleagues Profs. Joseph Brami, Pierre Verdaguer and Juan Uriagereka (U of Maryland) for the introductions and/or discussions about the films.

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Rosenblatt, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese (SPAP) and its head Dr. Eyda Merediz, within the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures and its Director Prof. Fatemeh Keshavarz, Spain’s Cultural Office in Washington D.C. through its Counselor María Álvarez de Toledo, and the Mexican Cultural Institute in Washington D.C., through its Director Beatriz Nava. And last but not least, this edition is possible thanks to the generous contribution of Spain’s Cultural Office of the Spanish Embassy in Washington D.C., presently headed by Miguel Albero, the UMD College of Arts and Humanities and SPAP. Special thanks are due to my colleagues: Prof. Juan Uriagereka who coordinated Institute Professor Emeritus, MIT and Laureate Professor U. of Arizona Noam Chomsky’s intervention; Distinguished University Prof. Steven Mansbach, whose introduction to Francesc Torres’s paper is also included; Prof. Joseph Brami, Dr. Daniela Bulanksy, Dr. Nélida Devesa-Gómez, Dr. Rachel Linville, Dr. Mehl Penrose, Dr. Mariana Reyes, Dr. Kathryn Taylor and Dr. Ricardo F. Vivancos-Pérez for chairing different sessions, as well as ABDs Cecilia Batauz and Sofía Maurette. ABD Juan Díaz handled the publicity, and Janel Brennan, our Language Instructional Technology Specialist, ensured our videoconferencing and taping, along with Dr. Nélida Devesa Gómez, who has also co-translated Prof. Fuentes’s contribution and co-transcribed Prof. Chomsky’s dialogue. And a special remembrance for our colleague, who unfortunately left us in 2021, Prof Michael Long, who chaired Dr. Feu’s session, and in line with Orwell’s ideas, lived in admiration of anarchism, particularly the kind that flourished in Republican Spain during those key years. In this volume, readers will find a group of academic texts from Section 2 through 4: Transnational Spanish Exiles in Maryland and the Americas: From Zenobia Camprubí, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Pedro Salinas to the Present; Getting There: United States Contradictions, Mexico, and Popular Resistance; and France: A Stepping Stone toward the Americas. Meanwhile, Section 5 is devoted to texts dealing with Film, Poetry and Music around the 1939 Spanish Refugees presented during a filmic and musical homage. And, finally, the last section, Eyewitnesses

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of Spain’s 1939 Exile in the Americas: The Privilege of Time and our Heartful Debt, features the voices of various witnesses and interpreters of the 1939 Spanish exiles’ legacies in the Americas. Finally, I want to thank for their contributions the sizeable group of participants affiliated with the Asociación para el Estudio de las Migraciones y Exilios Ibéricos Contemporáneos [AEMIC.org], and María Pizarro for her patient editing.

Transnational Spanish Exiles in Maryland and the Americas: From Zenobia Camprubí, Juan Ramón Jiménez and Pedro Salinas to the Present The Symposium addressed transatlantic and transnational implications and debts of some Spanish exiles in the Americas, as some of them transitioned from France and its ominous concentration camps across the Atlantic to eventually land in the USA, with many journeying through the Southern cone, the Caribbean and/or Mexico. This is further proof of the necessity to diversify our approaches and points of view on such a plural and unseizable corpus that exile refracts as an even more fractured cultural manifestation that problematizes the nation, gender and identity, generations, any canon, telos … Former UMD students, now faculty at several USA universities and colleges, displayed at our campus the impact and repercussions of some of these plural legacies in the Americas and Maryland, particularly during the Centennial of the UMD Graduate School. These researchers carry this Spanish exiles’ torch of excellence, seeded from our first landmark Symposium on the subject held at UMD more than thirty years ago. And, particularly, we highlighted exiled tradition in the state of Maryland, where eminent voices of Spanish literature such as Juan Ramón Jiménez with his companion, Zenobia Camprubí, and Pedro Salinas taught in area institutions during the 1940s. As faculty at the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins respectively, their example was continued, in the case of the 1956 Literature Nobel awardee, by his disciple, Gracia Palau-Nemes, a key name in seeking that award,

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who also left us in the Fall of 2019. Other symbols for this exile were also present at UMD throughout decades: my predecessor, Prof. José Ramón Marra López, author of an early Narrativa española fuera de España 1939-1961 (1963), whose disciple, María Elena Zelaya Kolker (1926-2021) pioneered a transnational study, Testimonios americanos de los transterrados españoles de 1939. She was a paramount influence on the immigration to the USA (U of California-San Diego) of one of the younger Spanish exiles in Mexico: Carlos Blanco Aguinaga (1926-2013). We also dedicated our 2019 gathering to another USA noted immigrant, and one of my intellectual guides at the University of Pennsylvania, who also taught at UMD as a Visiting Professor: Gonzalo Sobejano (1928-2019). These isotopies further explain the continuity for these studies at the College Park campus three decades later, through six UMD PhDs. They offer their diverse points of view on some of these questions, as proof of the presence and marks of these exiles and their disciples in the Americas. Dr. Anne Giller-Wilde (Catholic University) in Remembering the Spain of the Pre-Exile: Juan Ramón Jiménez, MacKinlay Kantor and 1956 presents a subtle exercise in comparative studies of exile, matching the Spanish writer and his USA counterpart and that same year Pulitzer awardee for his North American Civil War novel Andersonville, which happened to be written in Francoist Spain. It echoes the concentration camp literature so symbolic for the Spanish Republican exiles, since it details the presence of the eponymous prison camp for Union soldiers in Georgia, from its construction to its liberation after the end of the USA Civil War. Among the Union prisoners who often digress in remembrance of their home life and the circumstances which led them to fight and their subsequent enclosure, we find Nathan Dreyfoos. He traces a journey through the countryside of 1850s Málaga, as Jimenez’s Platero y yo details an itinerary through southern Spain in Moguer. Dr. Giller matches the journeys on donkeyback through the rural landscape of southern Spain from the perspective of an exiled Spaniard in the Americas and an American in Francoist Spain. Dr. Mariluz Bort Caballero (University of Huelva) in Forgotten Legacies: Verses from an Exile in (the) Feminine recovers in a timely

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fashion exiled women writers’ forced journeys, which had been relegated to an inferior critical level and/or the confines of oblivion. Their poetry is proof both of a sublime experience and a form of testimony and protection for the defeated and exiled. Bort’s essay establishes geographies of memory through the verses of four women writers in the American continent: Concha Méndez, Ernestina de Champourcin, both exiled in Mexico in 1939, and Concha Zardoya and Aurora de Albornoz who fled during the 1940s to the USA and Puerto Rico, respectively. The latter became one of the relevant sequels to Juan Ramón Jiménez’s voice. But all these poems derived from war and uprooting break a masculine yoke of silence, and posit identity seeds for exiled women writers. Dr. Kathryn Taylor (Towson University) and her Memory and Resistance in the Exile Texts of María Teresa León revisits this woman writer’s role which has been eclipsed by her companion, Rafael Alberti’s dominant presence in the canon. As a continuation of the antifascist battles during the Spanish conflict, Taylor clearly displays how Spain becomes increasingly unrecognizable to León while she fears that her generation of intellectual companions will be forgotten in the official Francoist cultural discourse. By exploring some of León’s lesserknown texts, Fábulas del tiempo amargo, and the play, La libertad en el tejado, written in exile, she displays María Teresa’s no less prevalent cultural and political engagement when compared to Alberti’s. Particularly, through the short-story collection, where León imagines a Spain in which small spaces of Republican resistance memory remain. Dr. Nélida Devesa-Gómez (Howard University) in Carmen de Zulueta: Creating and Recreating Memories as a Spanish Republican Woman through her USA Exile dwells on rewritings through this Hispanist’s memories published in the xxi Century, but seeded in her deep Spanish Republican past that grounded her throughout her long USA refuge. As a key witness to the educational and lifestyle changes undertaken by the Second Spanish Republic, Zulueta carried forward her displaced identity as a source of knowledge for a past transcended through an existential utopia. Dr. María Gómez Martín (California State U. San Marcos) in her Manuel Durán and Roberto Ruiz: Exiled Writers in the USA renders a

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pertinent study of the voice of two children from the Spanish Civil War, who eventually moved from Mexico to the USA academia (Yale U. and Wheaton College, respectively). She focuses on the brutality of a war based on the testimony of these nepantla (a náhuatl word for “in between”) liminal second generation writers who reconsider their nation’s historical, political and moral truths, in addition to questioning its boundaries, normative identities and memories as alternatives to official historiography. Her contribution draws on the traumatic American journey of Roberto Ruiz and Manuel Durán, in order to understand their different lost Spanish imaginaries, as well as their double alienation and lack of belonging beyond their Spain-MexicoUSA trident as changing existential interpretations. Dr. Rachel Linville (The College at Brockport) in From Max Aub to El Mazucu: The Spanish Exile and its Legacy draws meaningful analogies between one of the Asturias Civil War sites and remains, the 1937 Battle of El Mazucu, and Max Aub’s works. According to Dr. Linville, they share a relationship with exile and return of those 1939 Spaniards, and are relevant to our contemporary culture, at the juncture where certain politicians and intellectuals attempt to simplify and criminalize the crossing by water or land borders to Europe and the United States. She analyzes Aub’s critical reading of the absurd condition of humans, obsessed with papers, borders and laws in Manuscrito cuervo, where the satirical voice of a crow depicts life in the French concentration camp of Le Vernet d’Ariège (France). She contends that this is a place of memory similar to visits to El Mazucu during Summer conferences organized yearly by this underwriter in Llanes, Spain. Both display and help to keep alive recollections of the Spanish Civil War and the exile it caused. As a faculty at one of our neighboring universities, (George Mason U.) Dr. Ricardo F. Vivancos-Pérez, in Two Visions of the United States in the Fiction of Spanish Exiles in the 1940s: Manuel de la Sota and Pedro Salinas, studies the post-1936 new focus on cultures of destination in the fiction of these first-generation Spanish exiles in the United States: de la Sota’s Yanqui hirsutus (written in 1946 but published in 1949) and Salinas’s fiction of the late 1940s, the uncomplete narrative El valor de la vida (written in the late 1940s but

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not published until 2009) and the novella La bomba increíble (1950). This contribution examines how USA national identities and cultures are drawn with ambivalence, depicting a tension between accepting the resources, options and liberties that the USA offered them, and advancing a critique, also seen in Salinas’s poetry, of the material and immoral aspects of capitalism with diverse levels of irony and satire.3 As a sample for multifaceted territorial cultural exiled expressions from Republican Spain, Prof. Iker González-Allende (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) in An Exiled Basque Woman in the United States: Gender and Nation in Basque Girl (1940) by Mirim Isasi, discusses Rosita Durán’s autobiographical novel signed with a pseudonym, after having studied in England, gone through exile to Mexico in 1937 and eventually to the United States. In this text, she describes her national pride and presents an essentialist vision of the Basque Country: ancestry, traditions and the countryside, in order to deal with the uncertainties of displacement, and match the Delegation of the exiled Basque Government in the United States’ propaganda efforts. Nevertheless, the protagonist’s return to her homeland dramatizes the connections between gender and exile, after having lived in England as a dancer, and broken away from traditional gender roles imposed back in the Basque home by her family (dependence, marriage . . .) Therefore, she ends up forging a liminal national identity, between her Basque origins and a positive, independent and freer modernity in exile that overcomes the nostalgia caused by being uprooted from her homeland. To these contributions, I have updated one on the aesthetic and ethical issues that Zenobia Camprubí and Juan Ramón Jiménez faced while staying in Washington D.C. and Maryland: Juan Ramón Jiménez and Zenobia Camprubí in the USA: Between the Hard Rock of Ethics and the Wall of Aesthetics 1936-1939-1951 (Contra el olvido, pp. 61-79). It highlights some of the transnational issues that exile in the Americas presented to this engaged couple, with particular attention

3

Dr. Bécquer Seguin (Johns Hopkins U.) added a chapter about Salina’s years in Baltimore (not included in this selection).

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given to their homeland liberation, their 1948 trip to Argentina and Uruguay, the projection of Spanish literature and culture in the USA, as well as the post New Deal positions of Henry Wallace, and the key role of the USA and Latin America within the Spanish Civil War and beyond. These are subjects that will return in Dr. Andreu Espasa’s and Prof. Chomsky’s contributions.

Getting there: United States Contradictions, Mexico, and Popular Resistance Dr. Andreu Espasa, (Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, UNAM) in Mexico, the United States and the Spanish Civil War: Diplomacy, Arms and Refugees discusses the confluences of the Lázaro Cárdenas Mexican administration and USA President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s policies toward New Deal issues vis à vis the divergences in relation to the Spanish Civil War and its subsequent exile, while drawing the triangular relationship between Mexico, the United States and Spain in the late thirties. While Mexico supported the diplomatic cause of the Second Spanish Republic through arms sales and refugee humanitarianism, the Roosevelt Administration applied an uneven arms embargo to both parties: actually degrading the international and democratic status of the Republic and equating it to the rebel cause aided by the Fascist powers, while acting unsupportively towards the refugees, and even rejecting Spanish children from the Republican side. Such strategies have to be understood within the USA so-called appeasement policy, in order to avoid confrontation with Hitler and Mussolini by making continuous concessions to their challenges, and breaking the status quo from the end of World War I. On the contrary, the Mexican government decisively opposed such responses, and engaged itself in the League of Nations, an institution ironically drawn from the efforts of Woodrow Wilson, but never joined by the USA, as an instrument to guarantee international law and collective security. However, Dr. Espasa also studies the late shift for the Roosevelt Administration toward the conflict when considering the dire consequences in Latin

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America of the Franco victory. It also affected dramatically relations between Mexico and the United States, and led to a negotiated solution for the nationalization of Mexican oil in March 1938, within the decisive context of the European empires’ decline and the rise of Washington’s geopolitical power. Meanwhile, Dr. Montse Feu, (Sam Houston State U.) in her USA Hispanic Women Fighting Fascist Spain: Print Culture and Activism, draws a fascinating picture of the impressive pro-Spanish Republican activism in the USA with the determined involvement of women. As a counterforce to USA hesitancy toward the Spanish Civil War and its refugee crisis, in the 1930s, Anarchists and Socialists among Spanish immigrants living in the United States affiliated with the Sociedades Hispanas Confederadas (SHC) fought through España Libre, a periodical created as an answer to the Fascist takeover in their homeland. Worker-oriented and staunchly antifascist, these grassroots efforts where women were prevalent, raised money for refugees and political prisoners while advancing left-wing culture and politics, and diversifying an apparently elitist Spanish exile in the USA.4

France: A Stepping Stone Toward the Americas France as a geographical strategic neighbor was the key transnational spinning wheel for the 1939 Spanish exile. Many ships full of Spanish Republican hopes left French ports for the Americas, while some refugees kept a sentimental footing in the Hexagone, highlighted in our volume. Emeritus Prof. Pierre Verdaguer (UMD), in A “Carabinero”’s Tale of Survival: 1936-1945, included in Section 6, displayed the seeds of a transatlantic and transnational vocation set up by his father, Emilio Verdaguer, a Catalanist Spanish Republican Customs Officer who, starting in 1936 until 1945, displayed one of those thousands of exile

4

It may also be traced through Data Feminism (2019), the humanities digital project: Fighting Fascist Spain.

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and epic survival and resistance narratives on French soil, which eventually persuaded his son to pursue an academic career in the Americas and Maryland. Prof. Zoraida Carandell (University Paris-Nanterre) in The Spanish Republican Exile in Host Literatures, from France to the USA: a Transnational Approach, studies the comparative and evolving issues on both edges of the Atlantic (France and the USA) that eventually blocked literary exile into a dead end, unable to be accepted when facing the host French or North American dominant forms.

Film, Poetry and Music around the Spanish Refugees We were also able to present a sample of the film and music legacies of Spanish exile in the USA through two concerts each evening (Oct. 23-24, 2019) at the Embassy of Spain Cultural Office, and the Mexican Cultural Institute in Washington D.C. The first one displayed a new musical score for Jean-Paul Étienne Dreyfus-Jean-Paul Le Chanois’s mythical reconstructed film: Refuge. Intended for relief propaganda, it was hardly seen in the USA with its clandestine images of 1939 French Concentration Camps for the Spanish exiled Republicans. In her discussion of the film, Portrayal of Displacement: A Spanish Civil War Film and the Propaganda Machine, artistic director of the Philadelphia based ENAensemble, Spanish-American soprano Anaïs Naharro-Murphy, adds to her antecessor’s contributions on the former Spanish Republican president in exile, Luis Jiménez de Asúa, a precursor for universal justice, in the 1991 volume,5 as proof of this long-standing exile transmission in the Americas (https://youtu.be/ R1 Iq pOop). A second musical score was composed by Dr. Carlos José Martínez Fernández: “Itineraries”. From Exile to the Inner Voice. Dr. Martínez adapted a number of primarily USA and Mexico based exiled

5

José María Naharro Mora, “Luis Jiménez de Asúa en el exilio.” El exilio de las Españas de 1939 en las Américas, pp. 111-123.

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Spanish poems by Luis Cernuda, Ernestina de Champourcin, Jorge Guillén, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Pedro Salinas, as well as Federico García Lorca, a former NYC visitor (https://www.youtube.com/wa tch?v=_32ncpnNELo&list=PLwIwEKro8bRjdSepyCFHHfHsFIBRUU0z&index=6). This program, where Carlos Guastavino’s score for Rafael Alberti was added, was made possible, in part, thanks to a PICE fellowship for the dissemination of Spanish Culture awarded by Spain’s Acción Cultural.

Eyewitnesses of Spain’s 1939 Exile in the Americas: The Privilege of Time and our Heartful Debt The USA-based conceptual Spanish artist, Francesc Torres, in Ah! Distance debates the pertinence and origins of images in order to establish historical truths. From the vantage of photographic hybrid USA-Spanish installations such as Belchite-the South Bronx: A TransCultural and Trans-Historical Landscape, Torres has kept searching for a Spanish historical identity linked to the Civil War and its consequences, where art and memory and historical consciousness are not possible without images (see his photographs, pp. 319 and 320). He has established a strong reputation in order to “illustrate the supreme importance of an ideal,” as in his most recent installation (2021) Aeronautics Interior [Flight] (Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya) where he studies the moving impact of life and death through a changing point of view. In our volume, he recalls how contemporary USA art culture and Spanish memories feed each other within his most autobiographical work from 2004, Dark is the Room Where we Sleep [Oscura es la habitación donde dormimos]. The symposium also reevaluated the analogies and legacies of the 1939 Spanish refugees at a time of another migration crisis in the Americas, while paying attention to a few remaining protagonists, as a homage to a chosen group of eyewitnesses: Emeritus Prof. Víctor Fuentes (U California-Santa Barbara), already present at our 1989 UMD exile gathering, Emerita Prof. Marysa Navarro-Aranguren (Darmouth Col-

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lege), and Noam Chomsky who participated through a video conference. Unfortunately, we are not able to offer here to the readers Emerita Prof. Navarro-Aranguren’s testimony about her childhood emigration from Pamplona to the French borders, schools, and eventually the Americas. But Emeritus Prof. Víctor Fuentes in Memorable People and Works from the New York Republican Exile in Oblivion read a poignant account from those years when he had just landed in NYC, memories, finally rendered here in English (“Exiliados republicanos en Nueva York”/ mOrIr en Isla VisTA”). A Francoist army draft dodger exiled in 1950, who probably coincided with Marysa Navarro-Aranguren during the Civil War in the same evacuation camp for children in Bayonne (France), Fuentes renders vividly the Spanish émigré and exile landscape he encountered. It harbored many of the protagonists that Dr. Feu’s essay or Prof. Chomsky’s dialogue described from the 1930s and beyond. Therefore, Fuentes may be one of the last links relating the LatinX presence to other exiles from Spain and post 1977 Iberian newcomers to the USA. Above all, what distinguished those Spanish exiled communities was their spirit of solidarity that maintained the Spanish Republican hopes, at least, alive in their hearts, despite the many setbacks they encountered through their long and winding resistance road. Noam Chomsky described, in his dialogue with Juan Uriagereka and myself, how policies set up around the War in Spain and conflicts like Manchuria and Ethiopia6 were paramount for establishing Post-War domination strategies for the emerging USA empire, which should remind us of the hopes and contradictions today during the present war in Ukraine. Spain’s international conflict was a decisive turning point for the fate of the remainder of the world in the 20th century. Non-Intervention, and “the Century of Fear” as coined by Henry Wallace, Jiménez’s congenial intellectual soul, were tipping points where Spain’s fate and exile were sewn into evolving global crossroads. But Spain’s future was put on hold for several decades under Franco’s dictatorship despite the an-

6

Issues studied by Jorge.

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tifascist ethics of responsibility that should have guided the Post-war years and the birth of a “new world order” under the United Nations guidance. Even with clear forewarnings well known to the USA State Department about the totalitarian intentions and acts executed by the Francoist regimes, the ethics of interested imperial principles prevailed.7

Spain’s 1939 Exiles’ Legacies and Analogies Inside the USA, the universities where many of the Spanish exiles taught, were thriving, in part, thanks to the GI Bill that gave WWII veterans a rewarding chance of a higher education. Unfortunately, today, the financial and economic well-being of the USA student population is being threatened by the burden of rising tuition, rising costs of living, and rising debts. In fact, many of us believe that the USA student population debt crisis is the biggest danger for the stability of the nation. Excellent students are no longer able join our ranks in higher learning because of the fear of being unable to avoid a crumbling life of debt. But this hardship not only touches those expecting to get ahead through a college and graduate education. It also undermines those already admitted within our institution(s), who are unable to gather sufficient resources to provide for their daily living requirements. Students on USA campuses may be having to resort to housing quarters in the most unusual fashion in order to compensate for insufficient resources. These students are also being prevented by their own programs from seeking alternative working means that could supplement their meager income through underfunded fellowships or scholarships. Not only are some of our best students feeling the burden of long but low compensated hours that often infringe upon their contract stipulations: they are also incapable of finding alternative sources of support. Therefore, under such state of affairs, we may be failing as educators, since we are not even able to provide

7

https://www.lavanguardia.com/historiayvida/historia-contemporanea/ 20210808/7552315/plan-dictadura-exterminar-rojos.html.

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to the most needy, and yet key contributors of our population, the necessary material means for their success. Connected to the plight of the Spanish exiles, I often teach my students the writings of Langston Hughes, that constant, gigantic and shining figure in aesthetic brilliance and social equanimity. And I try to point out to them how Hughes’s denunciations went beyond his time. Back through the hardships of the 1930s, he clearly stated that “Negroes of America are tired of a world divided superficially on the basis of blood in color, but in reality on the basis of poverty and power–the rich over the poor no matter what their color. We Negroes of America are tired of a world in which it is possible for any group of people to say to another: You have no right to happiness, or freedom, or the joy of life. We are tired of the world where forever we work for someone else and the profits are not ours,” he added, when presenting his thoughts to the Second Congress of Antifascist Intellectuals, amidst the bloodshed in 1937 Spain. He probably did not want to anticipate that many of his Spanish comrades would have to flee their homeland in defeat, and that only a few would be admitted, write and teach in his unjust and inner exile USA. Langston Hughes’s words, as much as they are lucidly inscribed in history, remain among us as unavoidable marks for our present memory. When delivering them so many years ago in that distant land called Spain, he had understood that preserving those inequalities were also at the root of an unjust war that would eventually spread worldwide. And above all, he was anticipating our pending challenge today, as individuals, as institutions, and as a society, full of so many advances but often void of the minimum human dignity and humanity that also threatens many with despair and conflict. Again, this was one of the most determined messages and teachings that the 1939 Spanish exiles brought and taught in the Americas. Therefore, this is a necessary publication for keeping these exiles’ studies alive, as a continuation of our earlier ones, and particularly in view of a certain negative outlook for other Spanish traces in the USA. While episodes of Spanish colonial history on the continent are critically challenged under sometimes stereotypical revisionisms,

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we may be missing other subtle episodes where Spanish actors were not victimizers but victims, while never having a chance on a chessboard manned by those who claimed to be righteously free. As an extension of what Prof. Chomsky dissects, Orwell privileged eyesight was forged, among other areas, in the heart of the 1936-39 Spanish clash. Ideologies eventually may hide the trees of ordinary events and common decency, so dear to those Spanish exiles in the Americas. Their cries about totalitarian menaces kept falling on deaf ears internationally (from Max Aub, Victoria Kent, Juan Ramón Jiménez, María Teresa León, Constancia de la Mora, Juan Negrín, Isabel Oyarzábal or Ramón Xirau, to remind us of just a few). These traces should be contextualized, particularly today amongst post-truth imaginaries spun through cyberspace, when history, as an attempt to understand the past and forewarn the future, is over-mixed and undermined through memory as a privileged stepping stone for reaching and imposing rectitude, or is used within asymmetrical challenges that feed unto demagogic and populist extremisms that undermine democratic exchanges (Kosseleck), while postmodern anachronisms disseminate chronological contradictions. History appears helpless, caught between all kinds of past and future paradoxes, and lost among the thick and foggy present blindfolded by the imperatives of past redressing sought by generations void of time but obsessed by it (Hartog). Today, critical discourses are being refurbished through an idealized cancel culture: liquid equity and diversity higher education mandates within supposedly liberating, multicultural and endless differing schemes that may be, in the final analysis, just inverting former types of excluding dualisms: race, gender, class, origin, religious, etc. identities and dominances. These strategies may not be divergent from earlier dogmatic and muzzling practices, that late and glocal capitalism can also remarket in its favor. Consequently, claiming the old tale rewritten by Hans Christian Andersen about the Emperor’s New Clothes, where the monarch appeared naked, may be taken for an apology of some reactionary orthodoxy. But Orwell’s critique on how Stalinists were abjectly rewriting what Hitlerism had burned, and reinstating another dictatorial cultural revolution may serve as a profitable analogy for our present

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within our past.8 Invoking the Spanish exiles’ traces in the USA, could further remind us of the double standard of morality denounced by that tale dear to Orwell, that had landed on the Iberian peninsula, through an oriental corpus, Calila et Dimna, retaken by Don Juan Manuel’s El libro de los enxiemplos del Conde Lucanor et de Patronio (1335) [The Book of Exempla], on the path of the Medieval Iberian three cultural legacies. This being so timely today as the Talibans have entered Kabul, Non-Intervention is the law of the land, once more, and the latest conflict in Ukraine reflect our historical incapacity to prevent diasporic repetitions or comply with universal policies for refugees. A moving exile, an expelled and specular Iberian vividura rooted in the forging of a way of life within Christian, Muslim and Sephardic traditions and beliefs, eventually shattered by an usurping monarch like Isabella of Castille, who overturned them into a monolithic Catholic orthodoxy entrenched in absolutism and traditionalism (Ridao 253), that the exiled Américo Castro studied at Princeton. He highlighted their old blood hypocrisy and exclusion rooted in an exclusive Judaism, the inquisitorial dominance of univocity from a single believing Islam, and the appreciation for false and established villainous appearances, among a set of ideological and theological constructs, through Cervantes’s lucid version of the tale dear to Orwell: El retablo de las maravillas [The Altarpiece of Wonders].9

8

Ideological-theological paradoxes were also denounced, in the modern era of exile, by one of the first and sharpest of Spanish deterritorialized intellectuals, José María Blanco White. When describing the fallacies of the nation’s independence movement in 1808, he signaled: “the religious character which the revolution has assumed, is like a dense mist concealing or disfiguring every object which otherwise would gratify his mind. He can see no prospect of liberty behind the cloud of priests, who everywhere stand to take the lead of our patriots” (441-442). 9 “Cervantes’ sarcasm is an aspect of his own artistic technique, in which the expression of the experiential and the imaginable, the mockery and truth are inseparable (as I have shown it in other places)” [El sarcasmo de Cervantes es un aspecto de su misma técnica artística, en la cual son inseparables (según he hecho ver en otros lugares) la expresión de lo experimentable y la de lo imaginable, las burlas y las veras] (Castro 209). “That is why Américo Castro, instead of being a diplomatic agent of his own national culture —suppressing its inner oddities

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But the whispering examples of that wandering Spanish Republican Quixotic diasporic spirit, perched today on too few monumental mementoes and diminishing educational anchors in the USA, could be threatened further by a superficial cancel tagging crusade, as if those refugees had emanated from colonialism, or were rooted in white supremacy and structural racism, beyond any of the Weberian paradoxes of the ethics of principle and responsibility, or the salutary reflections of sound historic and cultural critical thinking. Analogously to Castro’s assertions, John McWhorter denounces: “America’s sense of what it is to be intellectual, moral, artistic, what it is to educate a child, what it is to foster justice, what it is to express oneself properly, and what it is to be a nation is being refounded [in 2021] upon a religion” (58). And he criticizes The Elect, a prominent group of high-placed academics who have framed a complex past and present through a performative ideology “as a religion” (23). McWhorter’s comments also mirror Ortega y Gasset’s prophetical forewarning about a critical and perspectivist history, almost a century ago, when lamenting, avant la lettre, a satisfied and liquid modernity, or the blooming of totalitarianisms that led to a global catastrophe: “Europe has no remission if its destiny is not placed in the hands of truly contemporaneous people who feel underneath themselves the entire historical subsoil, who know the present altitude of life and feel repulsion for every archaic and wild gesture. We need an integral history to see if we can escape from it, not to fall back on it” (my trans. 159). A set of ethical and aesthetical oxymorons, among others, kept alive those diverse and contributing Spanish elects exiled in 1939 along their American diasporas, and some of their examples that we studied at our symposium, should warm our hearts, eight decades later, when searching for a few of our common truths and decencies. Celorio, Asturias - Baltimore (Late Summer 2021-Spring 2022)

and rounding its hurting corners— has chosen to be a major strategist in Spain’s centuries-long intellectual battle with itself ” (Marichal 42).

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Works Cited Abellán, José Luis (ed.). El exilio español de 1939. Vol. 2. Madrid: Taurus, 1976. Blanco White, José María. Letters from Spain by Don Leucadio Doblado. London: Henry Colburn, 1822. Carroll, Peter N. and Fernández, James D. Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War. New York: Museum of the City of New York, 2007. Castro, Américo. De la edad conflictiva: el drama de la honra en España y en su literatura. Madrid: Taurus, 1976. Faber, Sebastiaan and Martínez-Carazo, Cristina. Contra el olvido. El exilio español en Estados Unidos. Alcalá de Henares: Instituto Franklin de Estudios Norteamericanos/Universidad de Alcalá, 2009. Fuentes, Víctor. “Exiliados republicanos en Nueva York.” Claves de la razón poética 167 (2006), pp.52-57. — mOrIr en IsLa VisTA. Novela del destierro. Madrid: Verbum, 2021. Hartog, François. Croire en l’’histoire. Paris: Flammarion, 2013. Hughes, Langston. “Too Much Race.” Crisis 44, Sept. (1937), p. 273. Jiménez, Juan Ramón. El modernismo: notas de un curso [1953]. Barcelona: Aguilar, 1962. Jorge, David. Inseguridad colectiva. La Sociedad de Naciones, la Guerra de España y el fin de la paz mundial. Valencia: Tirant Humanidades, 2016. Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Marichal, Juan. “Some Intellectual Consequences of the Spanish Civil War.” The Texas Quarterly 4.1 (1961), pp. 39-47. Marra López, José Ramón. Narrativa española fuera de España 19391961. Madrid: Guadarrama, 1963. McWhorter, John. Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. New York: Penguin Random House, 2021. Muñoz-Rojas, Ritama. “Poco a poco os hablaré de todo”. Historia del Exilio en Nueva York de la familia De los Ríos, Giner, Urruti. Cartas

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1936-1953. Madrid: Publicaciones de la Residencia de Estudiantes, 2009. Naharro-Calderón, José María (coord.). El exilio de las Españas de 1939 en las Américas: “¿A dónde fue la canción?”. Barcelona: Anthropos, 1991. — (ed.). “Los exilios de las Españas de 1939. Por sendas de la memoria”. La nueva literatura hispánica. 3. Valladolid: Universitas Castellae, 2000, pp. 86-254. — Entre alambradas y exilios. Sangrías de “las Españas” y terapias de Vichy. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2017. Ortega y Gasset, José. La rebelión de las masas. Madrid: EspasaCalpe, [1937] 2007. Orwell, George. The Freedom of the Press. — The Lion and the Unicorn. Socialism and the English Genius. Torres, Francesc. Belchite-theSouth Bronx: A Trans-Cultural and Trans-Historical Landscape. Zelaya Kolker, Marielena. Testimonios americanos de los escritores españoles transterrados de 1939. Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica/Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana, 1985.

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Transnational Spanish Exiles in Maryland and the Americas: From Zenobia Camprubí, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Pedro Salinas to the Present

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“Exile Studies at UMD: From Zenobia Camprubí and Juan Ramón Jiménez to the Present.” Keeping Spain’s Exiles in the Americas and Maryland: “Alive in our Hearts” (1939-1989-2019). University of Maryland. October 23, 2019.

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Remembering the Spain of the Pre-Exile: Juan Ramón Jiménez, MacKinlay Kantor and 1956 Anne Giller-Wilde The Catholic University of America

In 1956, the same year that Juan Ramón Jiménez won the Nobel Prize, MacKinlay Kantor was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Andersonville. Andersonville is the story of a Prisoner of War camp for Union soldiers in Georgia. It is told non-linearly from the perspective of both North and South but encompasses the life of the camp, from the razing of the trees to begin its construction, to the final liberation of the captive Union soldiers. Andersonville was written by Kantor in Francoist Spain. That Kantor would write about the North American Civil War in a country that was still recovering from its own Civil War immediately draws parallels between these conflicts 70 years apart in history. It would be around Kantor’s time in Spain that Juan Ramón would write from exile in Puerto Rico in 1953 about his last meet-

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ing with Francisco Giner de los Ríos, during which they discussed his Platero y yo and in particular, the page about Platero’s death. Juan Ramón relates Giner de los Ríos’ words: “‘Es perfecto’, me dijo lento. ‘Con esta sencillez debía usted escribir siempre’” (“III” 261). With these words, and this Appendix, Platero y yo is at the same time a product of the Pre-Exile and the Exile. The desire to maintain the literary integrity of this episode in time is also that of capturing a poetic portrait of rural Andalusia before the Spanish Civil War. I reference this appendix not as an interpretation of the death of Platero, but rather of the importance of Giner de los Rios’ words for Jiménez in the early 1950s as I am considering here the recounting of a sojourn on donkeyback through the rural landscape of southern Spain from the perspective of an exiled Spaniard in the Americas and an American in Francoist Spain. Nathan Dreyfoos, one of the many prisoner protagonists interwoven in Andersonville, mentally escapes the horrors and brutality of the camp by remembering the time he lived in Málaga circa 1856: I am more fortunate than many people here, because I have patience, imagination, and recollections to stay me. My body may suffer, it has fallen away, it may fall into nothingness and I shall go into nothingness along with it. But my mental health is superb, my spirit was never better. It is strong, quiet. I muster my humor with a shrug when need be. I have known many quiet places, and now I may go to them, released to ride where I list in my cart or on my mulo, seeing warm gray mountains saluting the milky blue sky, seeing poppies, hearing a woman cry to her child, Mah-ree-ah! in the village below my feet. Nathan Dreyfoos possessed a reservoir of pictures, perhaps he had more beauty stowed away than most any other prisoner in the place. At will he could go to Suffolk or Rome. There was the Swedish naval base; Karlskrona was the name; he could go there whenever he chose. Did Karlskrona have as large a population as Andersonville? He was positive it had not . . . He could go to Málaga. Málaga had many more people in it than did Andersonville. (Kantor 401)

Kantor wrote Andersonville from a rented house near Torremolinos in Andalusia. His time in Spain impacted him, as can be seen by his

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narratives The Works of St. Francis and Lobo, as must his friendship with Ernest Hemingway, whom he visited at Finca Vigía when the latter was writing The Old Man and the Sea. The episode that Nathan remembers is a trip he made alone at the age of 15 into the mountains on a donkey, during which he encounters various locals, from each of whom Nathan learns a life lesson that he remembers from the prison camp. Among them are a priest, who leads him down into a cave to pray —Nathan, who is Jewish, says, “My body remained standing, but my soul knelt” (Kantor 407)— a charcoal burner and his wife, and an outlaw bandit called El Lobo who lives in a cave. For the charcoal burner, who suffers from poor eyesight, Nathan shares his wine and shoots some quail before continuing on his journey and being taken prisoner by men working for the bandit. He is blindfolded and led along a tight, precarious mountain pass to the hideaway, where it is discovered that the bandit is the brother of the charcoal burner’s wife. Nathan is then celebrated and tries to mentally memorialize his time in the cave: he did not really wish to sleep at all; he wanted to stay awake, and glory in the enormous blue and silver myth which moonlight made of this region. Valley and shallow caves lost their entity as an actual party of the world’s surface–they became legend, along with the storied tinkle of goat bells somewhere in hills below, the wolves which howled on upper pinnacles, the gem made by a lounging sentinel overlooking the crack in the boulders which was the door to this mountain closet. (518)

Nathan would later read in a British magazine that El Lobo was captured and died in his jail cell from consumption “but he was able to divorce his own recollection of the bandit from the hateful, coughing, damp, expectorating misery of the picture conjured up. He saw El Lobo always, in his mind’s eye, presiding over rude lunches by hillside fires; he saw him enriched by the moonlight, and listening to the wail of his brother wolves even as he slept . . .” (520). Nathan’s father is a wealthy merchant whose family accompanied him on his constant worldwide travels, and it is Spain Nathan chooses to remember from Andersonville:

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Anne Giller-Wilde These treasures, invested through the years, brought to Nathan a perpetual income–an appanage which could not be withheld from him by any lord chamberlain of the future. It accrued in Andersonville when sorely needed. . . . soldier, does stench arise in waves? There’s honeysuckle tangling on a broken tower above the pale sea. Go and find it. (522)

Nathan’s trip through the mountains of southern Spain hinges on his using the family gardener’s donkey Tomás, whom he wants to purchase but settles on borrowing. He wishes to buy the animal a fancy halter but knows he must wait for the end of the journey because of the dangers that could await the rich, foreign son of a merchant in the mountains of southern Spain. His father is terrified that Nathan will have a run-in with bandits, but he proves his manhood throughout the ordeal and travels home safely, purchasing the halter in Coín before his arrival back in Málaga. This “woven harness” has “ornate medallions and colored tassels” and Tomás “tossed his head, he brayed seventeen times as soon as the new adornment was put upon him” (521-22). This personification of Tomás, from his reaction to the new harness to “a hat of heavy straw, with slits for his ears to stick through” (521) which Nathan buys him to fend off the heat underscores the animal’s role both as protagonist and impetus of the adventure. Writing in English, Kantor refers to Nathan’s pack animal as a donkey. However, interspersed in this episode, written in two different parts as Nathan mentally escapes the horrors of Andersonville, is some Spanish dialogue, in which Kantor seemingly interchanges mulo and burro. He first refers to a burrito cart as Nathan chooses a point in his past to focus on, “the fine strong cart he’d had when he was eight or nine . . . Better was the time when they’d come back to Spain again– Nathan recollected: he was fifteen at the time” (401). He decides to buy Tomás from the gardener, to which his mother objects, saying, “I thought you planned to borrow a mule if . . .” (404), to which Nathan responds that “Tomás is a splendid donkey” (404). There are later references to Nathan traveling “muleback” as well as to his mulo.1 The

1

Nathan’s story is told in two parts, interwoven with that of the other prisoners.

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adventure Nathan has while riding Tomás is to places that for him are untraveled territory, yet it is a sojourn to a place where he will later have a recollection of home, family, and of becoming a man, as the bandit Lobo calls him hombre. He thinks, “It will be a memory for me when I am old, so old that I cannot bestride a burro but must sit sideways like a woman. What a memory, what a joy. It is more potent than the oldest brandy, the richest wine from Jerez” (518). The burro par excellence in Spanish literature is Platero of Juan Ramón’s Platero y yo, who, unlike Nathan’s exploration of unknown territory, takes his owner on a journey through Moguer, on a wellknown itinerary. Predmore has acknowledged the analogy between Platero’s owner and Jesus Christ (53-60): the journey, the appearance, the contact with the poor, characteristics which we see replicated in Nathan’s trip through the mountains of the Málaga region. Like Jesus, Nathan too is Jewish. Although Nathan comes from a wealthy family he dresses like “a peasant–in rough clothes” (Kantor 405). He wants to buy Tomás from the gardener “to know that he was mine. I should feel like an emperor . . . Hills, valleys, vistas, las montañas, las colinas–all mine, all mine, spread before my gaze as if I were king of the entire landscape”(404), to which his mother responds, “Ah, young ambition! Nate, you should not wish to be a king” (404). The coincidence here is noteworthy regarding the analogy of kingship, but so is the journey into the known versus the unknown and the importance of this particular species of animal as transport. The description of Platero is well known: “pequeño, peludo, suave; tan blando por fuera, que se diría todo de algodón, que no lleva huesos . . . es tierno y mimosa igual que un niño . . . pero fuerte y seco por dentro, como de piedra” (Jiménez, Platero 85). Tomás is “a splendid donkey, young enough not to tire, but splendidly disciplined. Nor does he bite or kick” (404). Space, both physical and mental, has been amply analyzed in exile studies. From both of these works comes a desire to preserve or memorialize a pre-exile Spain from the perspective of the mid-1950s. The Spain that we see both in Platero y yo and Andersonville is a rural Spain of poverty. Kantor’s Nathan Dreyfoos can be seen in stark contrast to the other prisoners and to the Confederate guards, many of

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whom are uneducated. He is shot and killed from atop a guard tower by Flory Tebbs, the dim-witted son of one of the houses neighboring the prison, whose mother runs a one-woman brothel out of her home. His motive is simply that of wanting to kill a Yankee. Nathan’s death is brutal, shocking and unjust. As a worldly intellectual, we can of course read symbolism into his death at the hands of the South. Nathan eked out a survival in Andersonville by teaming up with an imprisoned sign maker and bartering haircuts and shaves for food and other objects. He enlisted because he saw the injustice of his idle privilege while his countrymen sacrificed themselves. Accepting the theory that Platero’s owner is a Christ-like figure, as we have seen, there are parallels in Nathan’s life. Nathan himself sees the likeness: He passed a troup of gypsies, and one of their women had a wet reddish horror instead of a nose, she was dying of this cancer, and had stuffed a rag into it, and her black eyes, once perhaps as lively as Nathan’s own–Her eyes stared and said, This is a horror, I am it, I am the horror, do you see me, how could you avoid seeing the horror which I am? Her claw came out for the coin he gave; and Nathan though in momentary agony of the Jew whom most of the Jews rejected and why had not He chosen to walk Andalucia with His healing ways a good eighteen hundred years after He walked Palestine? (520)

Nathan’s purpose for traveling alone is to prove his manhood. He sets out from the house his family is renting, goes into the mountains and returns home. The poetic voice of Platero y yo also makes a circular, cyclical trip through Moguer which reflects the changing seasons and their inherent metaphor of birth, growth and death. And in the words of the poet, “El recuerdo de otro Moguer, unido a la presencia del nuevo y mi nuevo conocimiento de campo y jente, determinó el libro” (Jiménez, “I” 255). I have theorized that literature may move in cyclical patterns similar to those of the stock market (Giller-Wilde) and that the coincidence or repetition of themes or styles can be explained by what Robert Prechter Jr. coined social mood. Prechter was an analyst of a stock market theory, proposed by Ralph Nelson Elliott and published in

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1938 in the United States during the Spanish Civil War. which asserted that the market moves consistently in cyclical series of five waves, three forward and two backward, a pattern which Prechter believed can be found in all human activity. For this reason he termed each completed set of five waves a social movement, since it is the activity of man which determines the movement of the stock market. I have proposed that we can examine this concept from a qualitative rather than quantitative perspective. Since literature, like the stock market, reflects human activity, I have observed that the movement of literary characters or voices follows this pattern. I have identified interliterary or exogenous waves which are legible between different works of literature and encompass various authors and time periods, as well as intraliterary or endogenous waves within a single given text. I have studied the phenomenon of these exogenous waves over a 150-year period of literary production which connects the Realist or Naturalist novel of the late 19th century, the novel of the post-Civil War and of the economic crisis of the 21st century in which I observed a prevalent social mood of indignation and resentment. The two texts I am considering here are of the same time period as the Spanish Post-Civil War novel, and it has drawn my attention that (1) Kantor was not a Spaniard but chose to write in Francoist Spain about a Pre-Exile Spain and (2) Platero y yo was written in Spain within the first quarter of the 20th century, before the historical dates assigned to the conflict, and his including of the appendix written in 1953 from exile contemporizes Platero y yo with Andersonville. The literary memory of the death, and therefore, life, of Platero, remembered by Giner de los Ríos and memorialized by Juan Ramón, renews it from a different decade even though its composition started around 1906. Within Platero y yo and the rememorative episodes I have referred to in Andersonville, there is a marked back and forth movement as the character Nathan Dreyfoos and the poetic voice of Platero y yo traverse Málaga and Moguer respectively. The stops made by Nathan —with the charcoal burner and his wife, the priest in the cave, the bandit El Lobo, the band of gypsies, and the marketplace in Coín— are not linear. They bring him on and off of his physical path even though he has no destination other than the metaphysical one of independence

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as a 15-year-old on the brink of manhood, but the success, such as the hunting of quail, and setbacks, such as getting kidnapped by bandits, progressively bring him towards his goal. Platero and his owner make many stops on their journey through Moguer, and, like Nathan, observe philosophically and nostalgically familiar people, landmarks and sights. Because of the geographic proximity between Moguer and Málaga, there are parallels between their itineraries, which, in a sense are a type of peregrination: the figure of the charcoal burner, the caves, the love of the animal, along with the ravages of life such as poverty and sickness as seen from donkeyback all serve as a backdrop for the passage of time, much briefer in the case of Nathan, for whom the change of season is not calendrical but rather spiritual. The remembrance of these pre-exile war landscapes carries with it the memory of the travelers marking and being marked by the landscape before it was stamped by the Civil War and distanced by exile, travelers who remember this formative experience which impelled them to a new purpose. The recognition accorded Jiménez and Kantor in 1956 is also a homage to the pre-Exile and indicative of a common social mood.

Works Cited Giller-Wilde, Anne E. Market Behavior in the Post-Transitional Narrative of Rafael Chirbes and Belén Gopegui. University of Maryland, dissertation. Pro Quest Dissertations Publishing, 2018. Jiménez, Juan Ramón. Platero y yo, edited by Michael Predmore. Madrid: Cátedra, 1993. Kantor, MacKinlay. Andersonville. New York: Signet, 1955.

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Forgotten Legacies: Verses from an Exile in (the) Feminine M.ª Luz Bort Caballero University of Huelva

It has been more than 80 years now since the end of a Civil War that brought with it the exile of 1939 and marked the history of Spain forever. This exile, separated from dominant strategies and narratives of the nation-state of Franco’s regime, left open wounds that remain unhealed to this day. It should be noted that there are as many different experiences of exile as there were exiled individuals. According to Josefina Cuesta in La odisea de la memoria, although the research on the Spanish Republican exile has not stopped growing in the last forty years, this bibliography remains incomplete. Among the necessary work still overdue is an in-depth study of the works of exiled women writers who have been relegated to an inferior peripheral position within exile studies. These women also represent spaces of memory and experiences of forced displacement. Therefore, I will attempt to contribute to the process of recovering some of these women writers

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and their verses in exile, in order to give them the visibility and recognition they deserve. Additionally, I aim to highlight, in the itineraries of the Spanish exile in the Americas and its common conditions of uprooting, some of the differences among the first and second waves of exiles and their destinations. Specifically, here I delve into the geographies of memory presented in some poems written in the Americas: Mexico, the USA and Puerto Rico. Through a brief selection of verses by Concha Méndez (18981986), Ernestina de Champourcin (1905-1999), Concha Zardoya (1914-2004) and Aurora de Albornoz (1926-1990), I will attempt to display exile and those experiences written under the effects of war and uprooting, with an emphasis placed on the condition of being written by women, and anchored in a nostalgia for a past. They deserve their own spaces within exile discourses and history books for their particular feminine experiences, alongside what for far too many years has been dominated by the writing and experiences of men.

Contextual Precedents and Places of Exile As for the historical and social contexts of these women poets, it is important to point out that the most notable changes for women in Spain started in the 19th Century. Their activities began to stand out more in intellectual and political spaces through Emilia Pardo Bazán, Rosalía de Castro and Concepción Gimeno de Flaquer, followed by political activists such as Clara Campoamor, Margarita Nelken, Federica Montseny or Victoria Kent. At the turn of the 20th Century, with the founding of the Residencia de Señoritas, university education was promoted for women, and the Asociación Universitaria Femenina and the Lyceum Club aimed to develop social, cultural and literary activities for them. The access to education allowed for the literary empowerment of women and, consequently, an increase in women readers. One of the most important accomplishments of the Second Republic was the inclusion of women’s rights in the Constitution of 1931. This acknowledged a new model of woman: modern, young and across-classes with professional as-

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pirations, even transgressing traditional feminine appearance and destabilizing masculine norms. It is at this time of change that Concha Méndez and Ernestina de Champourcin came of age. Both were members of the Lyceum Club and contemporaries of the Generation of 27. Concha Zardoya and Aurora de Albornoz also experienced their important formative years during this time. These authors participated in and were witnesses to the social advances in civil society and the modernization of Spanish life and culture. Although all of them were advanced and erudite for their times, the social pressures in their creative environments and settings, the disapproval and oppression by their peers and families, the normative stereotypes, social censorship,1 and lack of dedicated spaces and independence created a dependence on others for publishing and recognition of their work. This is not to mention the added difficulties of war, exile and dictatorship.2

1

2

It is important to remember Las sinsombrero, who had stones thrown at them for taking their hats off in Puerta del Sol. In the documentary by Tania Balló and Capdevila, Maruja Mallo explained that the hat was something established by the social norm of the time (a sign for aristocracy, education, and privilege) and the attack with stones was an accusation and a call for attention because they were associated with the third sex. I would like to point out that there are other understudied women who did take a more militant feminist position: women workers who went hand in hand with unions, such as the National Labor Confederation (CNT), the Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth and the Iberian Anarchist Federation. A feminist organization was created within Spanish anarcho-syndicalism: Mujeres Libres. They fought both inside and outside the home: some held arms during the war and looked like true Spanish suffragettes, while taking aim at machismo and homophobia. With the Second Republic, progress was made, but machismo was still latent, and men felt threatened by the advances of women. This presented a problematic social contradiction: all wanted changes, since men and their causes needed these women’s support for success, but these same union and many anarchist comrades also sought to maintain the traditional model of women who stayed at home. Meanwhile, some women organized, demanded more rights and were even jailed for their role. They supported their significant partners and saw them die, abandoned their lands and crossed the border carrying their children (Lorusso 2019).

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These exiled women’s points of arrival in a new world, where they sought asylum, are spread across the American continent: as a geographical space encompassing a very large area consisting of diverse territories in two hemispheres, the Americas have served as an ideal receptacle for diasporas, exiles and migrations throughout history, a tradition that continues today. It is evident that in certain periods period of displacement such as 1939-1947, the reception of Spanish Republican exiles was markedly different in the northern and southern regions. Diplomatic relations of Republican Spain with the Latin American governments, such as the case of Mexico, were notably more visible, unlike the different ties woven throughout North America. Similarly, as I have mentioned, there is an imbalance in academic studies geographically and critically around readings of these Spanish female intellectual exiles. Therefore, I offer here a sketch and a cartography that occupy different parts of the Americas and present a field of study in need of further investigation. Although the first group of intellectuals exiled in Mexico throughout 1939 set a precedent for the destinies and experiences of exiles, these intellectual women help us to fill a critical void by focusing on later times in North America. Concha Méndez and Ernestina de Champourcin belonged to the first generation of exiles from 1939; Concha Zardoya, and Aurora de Albornoz to the subsequent generation of exiles during the 1940s. Both generations present differences and similarities in their lived experiences in exile but also represent alternative transoceanic places that mark the geographical diversity of an exodus in the feminine for the Spanish Republicans. Being uprooted, loneliness, the memory of war and longing for a homeland are constant themes in the poetry of these two groups, as well as Antonio Machado’s metaphysics of time and the chronotope of exile previously sketched by Juan Ramón Jiménez. However, the process of reception and the experiences of exile reflected in the poetry of the North American exiles display greater isolation through the trials of a different language. These poets embodied the tradition found in Lorca’s Poet in New York, although it allowed them greater intellectual growth.

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South America vs. North America Víctor Fuentes points out that Spanish political exiles to the United States were constant since the 19th century. Although Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Cuba and the Dominican Republic stand out as great reception centers, some liberal and socialist intelligentsia passed through or resided for a time in New York City in the late thirties, before traveling to Latin America. Among them, we find Fernando de los Ríos, Ramón Menéndez Pidal, Américo Castro, Claudio Sánchez Albornoz, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel or Pedro Salinas. The founding in 1904 of the Hispanic Society of America, and in the 1920s of the Casa Hispánica at Columbia University, had helped to shape and extend the cultural reach and welcoming for the Hispanic cultural world in NYC. However, the United States was a country that offered little ease of access during the Spanish Civil War as it did not implement an official asylum plan like Mexico. Nevertheless, the Junta de Ampliación de Estudios (JAE) established some cooperative relationships with North American universities. Some intellectuals were able to obtain positions in Departments where Spanish was taught, especially in New York and the New England area (Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut). Others, like the second wave of Spanish Republican cultural exiles, began their journeys in Latin America and later moved into the North American academic system. Sometimes they lived apart from an environment they often misunderstood, using and hearing a foreign language that replaced that of their homeland. However, they attempted to reproduce the liberal and heterodox traditions of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza (ILE) and fostered the structures of Hispanism or Hispanic studies in the North American university system (Fuentes 52-53). Fuentes places special emphasis on remembering that many key exile works are a direct result of those intellectuals who stayed or passed through the USA: among them, Jorge Guillén, Pedro Salinas, Luis Cernuda and the universal poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, whose Nobel Prize, awarded during his time in exile in the Americas, could be considered a tribute

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to all exiled intellectuals (54). However, women such as Rosa Chacel, María Luisa Elío, Margarita Nelken, Silvia Mistral, María Teresa León, María Zambrano, as well as the poets studied here, contributed to the experience of dislocation, this time in the feminine, in both North and South America. They add to our understanding of this process and its repercussions.

South America: Concha Méndez (1898-1986) and Ernestina de Champourcin (1905-1999) In the early 20th century, Concha Méndez and Ernestina de Champourcin received an education at home with a special emphasis on language learning. Both grew up in Madrid and belonged to aristocratic families. Due to Concha Méndez’s longing for freedom, her adventurous spirit and her desires to be a poet, she emancipated herself from home and traveled to Argentina, although she returned to Madrid at the beginning of the Second Republic. Ernestina de Champourcin was a translator from a very young age. Going against her father’s wishes, she enrolled in university studies, but was required to be accompanied by her mother. Unfortunately, the atmosphere of male dominance forced her to quit before finishing her studies. However, both poets participated in the vibrant cultural life of Madrid in the 20s and 30s through intellectual elite circles where they met their future husbands. Concha Méndez married Manuel Altolaguirre and Ernestina de Champourcin Juan José Domenchina, both noted writers. Shortly after the beginning of the war, Concha Méndez moved to England and later to France, to protect her daughter while Altolaguirre stayed in Spain to work on propaganda projects. After he passed through a concentration camp, he joined them sick and suffering in Paris. With the help of other intellectuals, they were able to leave for the Americas. They spent four years in Cuba and later moved to Mexico in 1943. Ernestina de Champourcin moved from Madrid to Valencia, Barcelona and Toulouse. Domenchina was committed to politics, with a political position in the government of the Second

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Republic. Aided by the Intellectual Assistance Committee in Toulouse, they were invited by Alfonso Reyes to la Casa de España in Mexico. These women’s lives changed in exile. After the horrors of the Civil War and forced displacement, they began the process of starting over, adapting to new places, and finding accommodations and jobs to survive. Both Méndez and Champourcin left behind their family privileges in Spain and became the main economic support for their writer husbands who had been psychologically and emotionally devastated by the Civil War. To get money, Méndez sold books door-to-door, published mostly by her husband. Of course, this was all while taking care of their daughter. Champourcin had to work as a translator for the Fondo de Cultura in Mexico to provide for her family. Cordero Olivero points out those women intellectuals exiled in 1939 had even fewer opportunities than other women from lower social classes.3 Banishment meant sacrifice and resignation to family obligations for these women. Their creative work was interrupted, their intellectual life paralyzed and their writing pushed aside. Méndez published poems in 1939 and 1944, and again in 1977 and 1979, coinciding with a return trip to Spain. Due to the war, Champourcin would not begin writing again until 1952. She published six works that delve into a spiritual crisis, before returning to Spain where she continued publishing until 1978. It is not a coincidence that both resumed writing within trips to Spain. In addition, Champourcin’s thematic material changed significantly after her return and encounters with the upand-coming generations. These interactions stoked the melancholy and nostalgia for her paradise lost. The poetry of Concha Méndez in Mexico emphasizes the nostalgia and memory of a past marked by divorce and depression where she befriends her solitude. We see a nostalgic poetic voice

3

Cordero explained this point in her presentation “‘Supervivir’, perpetuar, tejer redes. El exilio de 1939 en femenino” on June 4, 2019 at the University of Huelva in the International Conference: “1939-2019: ‘España sale de España’ 80 years of the Spanish Republican exile.”

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that searches for a bond that still ties her to her native land. The sea, that poetic element used by Juan Ramón Jiménez as a means of connecting and disconnecting with Spain, is a recurrent theme for Méndez: [. . . ] soy de tierra adentro, y de la meseta alta pero la voz de los mares de norte a sur me reclama. Y no sé con quién quedarme —yo que nací castellana, si con la parda Castilla o con el mar que me llama. Oigo sus voces azules, como líquidas campanas, y esta otra voz que es de tierra que es como la voz de un alma . . . (220)

The sea also represents a stream of memories of youth and freedom that has now become full of pain and melancholia: Antes, me asomaba al mar y el corazón en el pecho se me ponía a cantar. [.....................] Ahora cuando veo la mar, escucho a mi corazón y se me pone a llorar . . . (211)

This sensorial memory is both a vehicle for and transfer to another space and time. While walking through a park in Mexico, she notes: Me senté a reposar y ancho perfume sentí que en mis sentidos se adentraba. Y se me vino al alma extraña angustia. El ala de un recuerdo aleteaba . . . ¡Ah sí, ya sé! . . . ! ¡Perfume de unas rosas! . . . ¡Otro país! . . . ¡El mío! (221)

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Ernestina de Champourcin resumed writing upon her return to Spain but was again confronted with the experience and feeling of being uprooted. The memory of the voyage and her life outside of Spain made her painfully aware of an eternal exile. The absence of her homeland brought about a new consciousness of exile and war-time memories: La noche se desgarra a golpes de culata. Extrañeza de pasos irreales. Ciudad en vela. O tal vez es el campo y un moscardón se obstina contra vidrios herméticos. Pero el campo no existe, Hay una fuerza oculta empeñada en destruir lo armonioso y lo puro (Primer exilio 15)

She also remembers the firing squads: Un miedo desde fuera estrujaba los cuerpos contra la cal sobrante de la pared sin fondo.

and traces the trajectory of her voyage to Mexico: Quisiera llegar pronto porque el mar nos aleja. Este navegar juntos extiende entre los dos una enorme distancia. ¡el mar más mar que nunca! (17)

Distance and belonging or the juxtaposition of different places, a spatial estrangement as the fusion of the here with the distant there are part of a totem for Champourcin:

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M.ª Luz Bort Caballero Todo es nuestro allá lejos y los que ya no aguardan la vuelta hacia su luz saben que están aquí aun en su allá distante (40)

The Second Group of Exiles in North America: Concha Zardoya (1914-2004) and Aurora de Albornoz (1926-1900) The massive displacement of 1939 continued throughout the forties. Oppression, autarchy, nullification of rights, freedoms, persecution and censorship forced subsequent escapes. This resulted in a second generation of exiles, among them, children of the war. Under the dictatorship, the model of the perfect married woman was imposed: a Catholic woman dedicated to children and the domestic space, which hardly agreed with the women poets, their liberal minds or the modern models they represented. Concha Zardoya and Aurora de Albornoz left Spain after the massive outflow of 1939. As they were younger, they had experienced more fully the modernity of the Second Republic. Their migrations offered opportunities for academic endeavors as they were not forced to sacrifice their priorities for family obligations. But even though they were granted opportunities they would not have had in Spain, the estrangement and nostalgia for their homeland are present in their works through memories, melancholy and a need to reconstruct their identity across a new environment. In this second wave, poets present a feeling of being torn between their new homes and a sensation of loss brought on by their separation from Spain and the anguish over their banishment. Concha Zardoya was born in Chile to Spanish parents. Her family returned to Republican Spain when she was 17. Zardoya attended university in Madrid where she studied Philosophy and Letters but ended up in Valencia in order to to become a librarian. She was marked by the loss of her only brother in the Civil War, and reflected

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on it in her poetry. She went into exile in 1947. The displacement gave her the opportunity to finish her PhD at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She taught Spanish, culture and literature in Tulane and Boston. She would spend 30 years abroad before returning to Spain in 1977. Exile is at the root of a deep poetics of reflection on and criticism of the painful experiences suffered during the Civil War and separation from Spain. Death, solitude and the homeland as a lost space, distant and longed for, are all recurring themes in her poetry. Writing as an exercise in self-exclusion and language became an adoptive motherland, standing in for both her original home and her inability to adapt to the spaces that had welcomed her: Es mi única patria la palabra. Esta palabra viva que derramo [............................................] Las sílabas rezuman toda el alma el poso de silencios acuñados. Y flor, sustento, luz, piedad, el agua vivo, respiro, bebo, pronunciando quedos versos y prosa castellana, “buenos días” al aire tan callado. (Corral de vivos 127)

The poetry of Concha Zardoya reflects the terror and pain of a country oppressed, of life stained with hate, but with a hope of reconciliation: ¡Si el dolor naciera la alegría la ilusión de una España clamorosa, unánime, feliz y trabajada por las manos de todos, cada hora! Si de las penas, madre, de tus hijos salieras consolada y luminosa. (19)

Many of her poems are similar to those of Méndez and Champourcin, charged with nostalgia for a lost country and those killed in the war:

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M.ª Luz Bort Caballero Cicatrices del tiempo en las paredes, amarillas, verdosas, funerarias, con asomos de musgos delicados, de aguas negras, perdidas, resbalando, sepultas, al origen secreto de las lágrimas. ¡Melancolía es para los ojos y este sensible amor que los traspasa! (43)

Other diasporic poems reflect on her experiences in the United States, like living in Manhattan: the technological development, dehumanization or mechanization of individuals, as Zardoya reflects and sings in her poem “Subway” (Manhattan y otras latitudes, 1983): el hierro penetra en los abismos en la roca horadada, en esos pozos que minan la ciudad y la sostienen [..............................................] robot, clavija, biela o torniquete. (14)

On the other hand, her poems also address social class inequality, racism or a condemnation of the treatment and living conditions of the Black community living in Mississippi, as an echo of Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York (1930). Aurora de Albornoz, the youngest of these women authors, was born in 1926 when Méndez and Champourcin were publishing their first poems. This ten-year-old witness of 1936 would be marked by the conflict poetically. Eight years later (1944), Albornoz was exiled with her family to Puerto Rico. Her Asturian relatives had strong literary and political ties to the Second Republic: her uncle Álvaro de Albornoz was the minister of Justice and later president of the Republican government in Paris and Mexico.4 She studied at the University

4

It should be noted that part of her family also lived in exile in the USA her uncle, Severo Ochoa, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1959, yet another Spanish exile with a prize of international recognition.

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of Puerto Rico under the mentorship of Juan Ramón Jiménez. She married an exiled Republican from Andalucía, but they later divorced. Albornoz enjoyed several stays in Kansas (USA) and Paris. She was one of the intellectual women from the second wave living in Puerto Rico who also shaped Hispanic studies through the North American University system. She studied comparative literature, and spent time in Salamanca doing her PhD. She traveled again to Puerto Rico in 1966 but returned definitively to Spain in 1968. She taught at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid and New York University in Spain. Her academic work deals mostly with exiled writers from Spain. Just as Proust has pointed out in relation to the juxtaposition of times and spaces lived in the homeland of origin and in the host country, her poetry is defined by a dialectic of separation, an interior garden split in two by the past and the present: Yerbas nuevas alrededor de mi sueño. Joven olor de resinas en el viento. Aguas niñas por el río. Un cielo mío y pequeño. Sonido azul de campanas lejos . . . (Brazo de niebla 15)

Her verses display echoes of both Machado and Juan Ramón with a flow of time that is impossible to detain and a preoccupation with leaving evidence of this “word in time”. As in “Time” and “Space”, major landmarks by Juan Ramón Jiménez, the free flow of consciousness and navigating through the memory of time are reflected in Albornoz’s poems: guardar este segundo encerrarlo en palabras, o en notas, o en colores. Vencer al otro tiempo (el otro tiempo fuera, con arrugas y olvido). (20)

At times, a division reflects a splitting of the subject:

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M.ª Luz Bort Caballero Mi yo diferente. Mi punta igual y contraria. Lleva dentro un distinto yo posible [.........................................................] Mi mirada/ quiere entrarte por los ojos y se congela delante. Mi más yo, absurdamente lejano. (28)

And again, distance and memory appeal to the senses and remind us of what we saw before in Méndez’s verses: Flor de olor amarillo, ¿es verdad que en el prado de la niebla tanto ha llovido que hasta los naranjales han florecido? (Poesía comp. 225) Hoy con la primavera, en un marzo lejano de distancias y tiempos, me trajo el sol un ramo de violetas. Violetas infantiles, sin perfume, con frescura de yerba y claridad de lluvia. […] Vienen llenas de tardes con sabor de boroña y nombres repetidos de los bueyes. (Brazo de niebla 60)

Albornoz uses writing as a door to her childhood memories in order to testify to her experiences marked by war and exile. This is not simply the byproduct of nostalgia in her poetry but is driven by a modern spirit of discovery of the Spanish world in the Americas. She was fascinated by the Afrocaribbean influences in Puerto Rico and often included characteristics of Caribbean mythology or regionalisms in her poetry. A product of hybridity in many ways, reflecting a Pilgrim Spain that arose from an America open to avant-

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garde dimensions and connections with other languages and cultures.

Conclusions Through these four women poets, I have attempted to present different experiences of exile and its multiplicity through voices in the feminine. They all take refuge in their memories to survive forced displacements and recover lost spaces. There is a clear division when considering the first two women poets who prioritized their family responsibilities and supporting roles. These are exiles according to a patriarchal framework of commitment and dependence on their husbands and an accommodation within circumstances. The second group is determined by a later displacement, and they use the poetic word in order to maintain their memories alive, but they do not sacrifice their literary creativity; on the contrary, they evolve in academic and intellectual ways. However, those forgotten exiled women are also the ones who suffer most intensely from the alienation of exile. The contrasting concordance between here and there, then and now, and their poetic voices remembering former spaces place them as though they were passers-by encountering new grounds. They are also marked by their marginality as women with a blurred identity, in need of fresher valuations. All these experiences are linked to autobiographies that take refuge in poetry in order to conceal unhealed wounds: traumatic experiences from the Civil War and forced displacement, dislocation between the expelling land and the preserving ones. A unique set of displacements within the Spanish Republican diasporas. These women deserve the full recognition of yesterday and today.

Works Cited Albornoz, Aurora de. Brazo de niebla. Santander: s.e., 1957. — Poemas para alcanzar un segundo. Madrid: Rialp, 1961.

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Alted Vigil, Alicia. El archivo de la II República española en el exilio, 1945-1977: inventario del fondo París. Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, 1993. Ascunce, José Ángel. “Ernestina de Champourcin a través de sus palabras.” Ínsula 557 (1993), pp. 22-24. — “Introducción.” Ernestina de Champourcin. Poesía a través del tiempo. Barcelona: Anthropos, 1991, pp. 9-73. Balló, Tània. Las sinsombrero: sin ellas, la historia no está completa. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 2016. Bellver, Catherine G. “Los exilios y las sombras en la poesía de Concha Méndez.” Una mujer moderna. Concha Méndez en su mundo (1898-1986), edited by James Valender, Madrid: Residencia de Estudiantes, 2001, pp.193-206. — “Literary Influence and Female Creativity: The Case of two Women Poets of the Generation of 27.” 20th Century 15.1/2 (1997), pp.7-32. Cabré, María Ángeles. Leer y escribir en femenino. Girona: Aresta, 2013. Camblor, Begoña. Hacia todos los vientos. El legado creativo de Aurora de Albornoz. Madrid: Devenir, 2010. — et al. Palabras reunidas para Aurora de Albornoz. Actas de las jornadas celebradas en Luarca del 19 al 21 de diciembre de 2005. Oviedo: Universidad de Oviedo, 2007. Capdevila-Argüelles, Nuria. El regreso de las modernas. Valencia: La Caja books, 2008. Champourcin, Ernestina de. Primer exilio. Madrid: Rialp, 1978. — Presencia del pasado. Málaga: S.e., 1996. — Poemas de Exilio, de soledad y de oración. Madrid: Encuentro, 2004. — and Arizmendi, Milagros. Cántico Inútil: Cartas Cerradas; Primer Exilio; Huyeron todas las islas. Madrid: Centro Cultural de la Generación del 27, 1997. — and Siles, Jaime. Poesía esencial. Madrid: Fundación Banco Santander, 2008. Cuesta, Josefina. La odisea de la memoria: historia de la memoria en España, siglo xx. Madrid: Alianza, 2008. Esteves, Joao and Johnson, Roberta. “Historical Overview of Portugal and Spain.” History of Iberian Feminisms, edited by Silvia

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Bermúdez and Roberta Johnson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018, pp. 243-255. Fernández Urtasun, Rosa and Ascunce, José Ángel. Ernestina de Champourcin. Mujer y cultura en el siglo xx. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2006. Fuentes, Víctor. “Exiliados republicanos en Nueva York.” Claves de la razón poética 167 (2006), pp. 52-57. Jiménez, Juan Ramón. Españoles de tres mundos: viejo mundo, nuevo mundo, otro mundo. Caricatura Lírica, 1914-1940. Madrid: A. Aguado, 1960. — Jardines lejanos. Madrid: Taurus, 1982. — Espacio y tiempo. Ourense: Linteo, 2012. Larraz, Fernando. El monopolio de la palabra: El exilio intelectual en la España franquista. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2009. Lorusso, Isabella, et al. Mujeres en lucha. Madrid: Altamarea, 2019. Mangini, Shirley. Las modernas de Madrid: las grandes intelectuales españolas de la vanguardia. Barcelona: Península, 2001. Méndez, Concha. Poesías completas. Málaga: Centro Cultural Generación del 27, 2008. Naharro-Calderón, José M. Entre el exilio y el interior: El “entresiglo” y Juan Ramón Jiménez. Barcelona: Anthropos, 1994. Nieva de la Paz, Pilar. Roles de género y cambio social en la literatura española del siglo xx. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. Niño, Antonio. “El exilio intelectual republicano en los Estados Unidos.” Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea, vol. extraordinario, 2007, pp. 229-244. Rodríguez, Mercedes. La poesía de Concha Zardoya: estudio temático y estilístico. Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid, 1987. Romero, Dolores. Seis Siglos de poesía española escrita por mujeres: pautas poéticas y revisiones críticas. Bern: Peter Lang, 2007. Valender, James. Una mujer moderna: Concha Méndez en su mundo, 1898-1986. Actas del Seminario Internacional celebrado en la residencia de estudiantes en mayo de 1998 con motivo del centenario del nacimiento de Concha Méndez. Madrid: Residencia de Estudiantes, 2001. Zardoya, Concha. Corral de vivos y muertos. Buenos Aires: Losada, 1965. — Manhattan y otras latitudes. A Coruña: Sociedad de Cultura ValleInclán, 1983.

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Memory and Resistance in the Exile Texts of María Teresa León Kathryn Taylor Towson University

Despite the imprint that Spanish Republican exiles have left on universities across the United States, the inclusion of exile texts in university literature courses is a relatively recent phenomenon. Just over fifteen years ago, I found myself in Guadalajara, Mexico, set to begin a Master’s program in Spanish. Several months prior to the start of the summer term, I carefully selected two courses that I hoped would complement my first trip to Mexico: Contemporary Mexican Literature and Mexican Culture and Civilization. I then chose a third course, whose title caught my attention because I knew absolutely nothing about it: Spanish Republican exiles in Mexico. While I had completed an undergraduate degree in Spanish, having taken advanced literature and culture classes, I’m not sure I had ever heard the word ‘exile’ mentioned in reference to Spain. This really isn’t surprising considering that I began my undergraduate studies in the mid-

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1990s, a time when the literature of the Latin American boom still predominated in university literature courses.1 Over the course of six weeks, I was introduced to the works of Luis Buñuel, Luis Cernuda, José Moreno Villa and Concha Méndez. Immersed in Mexican culture for the first time, I related to the exiles’ feelings of alterity and observations while reading Cernuda’s Variaciones sobre tema mexicano and Moreno Villa’s Cornucopia de México. And, it was the study of Concha Méndez that fueled my interest in the feminine voice in exile. While the course itself highlighted the effects of exile on the authors and their artistic and literary expression, little was mentioned about the place of exile literature within Spanish literary and cultural studies. In a sense, this somewhat naive introduction to Spanish Republican exile turned out to be favorable because it permitted me to form my own ideas and opinions on the topic. Several years later, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to begin my doctoral studies at the University of Maryland under the direction of José María Naharro-Calderón, whose guidance helped me to theorize and develop these ideas even further, particularly the importance of studying the relationship between the cultural productions of exile and territorial Spain. While this is not a paper about Spanish Republican exile in the United States, it does present a perspective that likely would not have been possible without the lens of having studied in the United States. Due to their political ideals and participation in the events of the Spanish Civil War, María Teresa León and Rafael Alberti have often held what might be considered an iconic position in the study of the Spanish Republican exile of 1939. While both names have been linked to this culturally and politically active period, as has happened with many intellectual couples, León’s literary persona has long been overshadowed by the very public voice of Alberti.

1 Faber (Anglo-American Hispanists) situates the move towards Latin American literature in the decades following the Spanish Civil War, when professors of Spanish in the United States were discouraged from discussing the war or its consequences with their students.

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For far too long, studies of María Teresa León were focused solely on her autobiography, Memoria de la melancolía (1970), in which she gives testimony to the personal and collective experience of the first decades of the 20th century in Spain, the years of the Spanish Republic, the Spanish Civil War, and the pain and nostalgia of exile. However, the most cited sentence of Memoria de la melancolía has been, “Ahora yo soy la cola del cometa” (222). Until recently, the focus on Memoria de la melancolía has overshadowed the extensive literary activity of María Teresa León, which includes no less than seven novels, eight collections of short stories, four essay collections and several plays. This doesn’t include her journalistic contributions or still unedited texts, some of which have been published relatively recently. By studying some of María Teresa León’s lesser-known texts, we discover that our author was as culturally and politically engaged as Rafael Alberti, if not more so. In her texts written in exile, María Teresa León seeks to present a vision of history that is contrary to the official Francoist discourse. In many cases, the historical and mythical characters that she includes in her texts are symbols of the lost cultural battle of the Civil War and a preoccupation with the future of Spain in their absence. While these themes are present in numerous texts written by María Teresa León, I will focus here on the short-story collection, Fábulas del tiempo amargo, and the play, La libertad en el tejado. In both of these texts, we see León’s pained vision of Spain in her absence and how she uses each of these texts as an attempt to maintain Republican cultural memory. Gregorio Torres Nebrera has described Fábulas del tiempo amargo as “historias de un tiempo histórico y existencialmente dolorido, trágico, cruzado de sangre, exilios y soledades” (83). The first stories in the collection evoke barbaric and primitive imagery, depicting scenes of persecution and human sacrifice. As we continue reading these narratives in which León weaves personal and collective memory, it becomes clear that they reflect the personal traumas of their author: the expulsion and departure from Spain, the feelings of impotence provoked by abandoning her country, and the ceaselessly imagined, yet impossible return.

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When reading these texts, Dominick LaCapra’s ideas on writing trauma are useful because in Fábulas del tiempo amargo, the full weight of the trauma of exile becomes evident. According to LaCapra, writing trauma: involves processes of acting out, working over, and to some extent working through in analyzing and “giving voice” to the past–processes of coming to terms with traumatic “experiences”, limit events, and their symptomatic effects that achieve articulation in different combinations and hybridized forms. (186)

Of particular importance here is the idea of “reactivation”, the process by which León repeatedly and compulsively returns to her traumatic experiences in her texts. For example, in the second story of this collection, “Comed, comed, que ya estoy invitada”, for example, the narrator takes the form of a woman with the body of a deer.2 In what can be interpreted as a sacrificial act, she allows herself to be captured by a group of hunters, following a lengthy chase. After her capture, the story of the deer conflates with that of the woman, symbolizing the sacrifice of those that were defeated in the Civil War through death, imprisonment or exile. And, as the deer-woman is bled to death by her captors, she reflects on the parallels between the former and exile: ¿Cómo es posible dejar todo atrás, perderlo? . . . Imágenes suficientes apasionan la vista, justo aquella mañana, y olvidamos todo para mirarlo tan exacto, hasta la orden de nuestra derrota. La Creación entera olvidaba que habían nacido también la ira, la cólera, el escarnio, la venganza. El mundo de los ricos y los pobres resplandecía del mismo sueño y nadie recordaba las caras de las víctimas y menos los vientres vaciados ni las

2

Torres Nebrera points out the possible influence of Bécquer in this imagery: “Como no puede negarse el recuerdo de la hermosa leyenda becqueriana La corza blanca. Y es bien conocido el interés de María Teresa León por la figura y la obra de Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer” (Fábulas del tiempo amargo 84). Tampoco podemos olvidarnos del poema albertino de Marinero en tierra: “Mi corza, buen amigo, / mi corza blanca. / Los lobos la mataron / al pie del agua” (96).

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caritas principescas de los cervatillos asesinados. Nada hay más sencillo que olvidar. (309)

Here, León also references the same familial divisions depicted by Rafael Alberti in De un momento a otro, as the deer is prepared for cooking: “Llegó el instante de las ollas y vi entrar a mi madre. ¡Nunca estuvimos más lejos! Ella echó sal sobre mi traje; ella echó pimienta sobre mis ojos; ella dijo de rodearme de laurel, yerbabuena, mejorana y tomillo; ella con su cabeza en alto para no ver la sangre . . .” (311-312). Following the story of defeat and sacrifice, the next recounts the final departure from Spain. The anticipation of leaving invokes memories of her youth, the war and her participation in the Guerillas de Teatro. Conscious of the fact that her departure signifies the end of an important era in her life, she writes: “No dudo que los días mejores han concluido. Entraron uno a uno en el reloj del fondo de los tiempos” (316). As she says goodbye to her past, the plane (El Águila) ascends, carrying her towards the uncertainty of exile: “Las nubes saludaban al Águila y yo seguía tendida sobre mi tierra, abrazada más que una amante estuvo nunca, sollozando de desolación. El tiempo transcurría con sus pies descarnados. Nada era cierto ni del todo incierto, la curva del amor aún posaba su doble palma en la palma de mi mano, y así, masculina y femenina, juraba fidelidad sobre el libro del aire” (316-317). In this tale, León also recognizes that exile is the inevitable consequence of staying true to her ideals and never giving up. She realizes that both her and Alberti’s political commitment, means continuing their battle from afar. Yet, life will continue in Spain, even in their absence: Era el impávido de lo que sin mí iba a permanecer: los duelos, las fatigas, el árido color de la noche, los bordes de los lechos desarreglados de improviso, la muerte involuntaria, las auroras llegando por costumbre a abrir las flores, la voz que iba a quebrarse al ser interrogada, el ruiseñor de mayo, la alondra de agosto, la perdiz de setiembre, todo cuanto sucedería en mi ausencia golpeaba mi corazón. (317)

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Thus, the focus of her efforts in exile becomes countering the official Francoist discourse that has erased the names of the exiled intellectuals from collective conscience. In Memoria de la melancolía, León writes of the inability to recognize the country she reads about in the news, a medium heavily controlled by the government censors. A long-held myth about the Republican exile is that there was no communication between the exiles and those living in Spain, and that the exiles, in general, received no news of what was really happening in Spain (Ilie). However, in “Las estatuas”, León writes of the “hombrecitos blancos” and the “hombrecitos de papel que le traen noticias sobre el interior”, alluding to the letters and other documents that she receives from inside Spain, a detail that supports the idea that there was more contact between exiled and territorial Spain than it appeared.3 The news received from Spain, however, only provokes pain and sadness: Al levantar mi frente de la mesa me encontré rodeada de hombrecillos blancos que salían de los sobres. Todo seguía igual. El banquete salvaje del mundo continuaba entre vejaciones y disparos. En aquel país la gracia de Dios no florecía y la santa paciencia de sufrir caía en vano. ¿Cómo romper queridas cartas la memoria? Os ruego. ¡No puedo más! ¡Desunidme, cortadme el cordón que me une al vientre de mi tierra! (Fábulas 329)

While León has tired of living among “cartas y muertos”, she is also ashamed of the fact that exile has brought nothing but disillusion: Patria, ¿cómo ir hacia ti vestida de pobreza, de desilusión, de desesperanza? Aún vive sobre tu campo verde el dragón que echa fuego; todo es degradación, desorden sobre tu piel; me exaspera pensarte a ti, hermosa claridad corrompida, suprimidos los pensamientos libres y claros de tu adorno. Insistía la carta más dulce, posada sobre mi hombre. ¿Cómo, no quiere reconocerme? Yo soy la juventud que siguió después de que tus pasos se fueron, nuestros ojos no te vieron jamás. Te referimos, te contamos, eres la fermentación de nuestro sueño. (329)

3

See Gracia, A la intemperie.

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In Memoria de la melancolía, María Teresa León laments: “Nada tenemos que ver nosotros con las imágenes que nos muestran de España ni el cuento nuevo que nos cuentan” (98). While the Spain she longs for no longer exists, returning is never far from her mind, yet it is only possible in her dreams. The dream of her return is the central theme of the last of Fábulas del tiempo amargo. In “Por aquí, por allá”, the narrator anticipates the probable disillusion of returning. Accompanied by a white horse and “Juan el fuerte, Juan el bravo, a Juan el que ve sin mirar las intenciones debajo de la tierra” (332),4 our narrator doesn’t find the same Spain that she had abandoned in 1939. Instead, she finds a space characterized by repression, constant vigilance, and, worse still, collective amnesia with regards to the effort and sacrifices of León, Alberti, and other Republican intellectuals of her generation. The narrator of “Por aquí, por allá” wanders the streets of Madrid and observes: La multitud salía de los cines, se miraba en los escaparates de reojo. La ciudad amontonaba pasos y hacía un stock de empujones en el metro, ante el que por caridad siempre pide limosnas. Y me iba alejando de mí misma en la fila de puntos del final, hasta verme entre todos ellos la misma y diferente, con la moda de antes, con modas sucesivas de las de antes . . . Me tocaron el hombro. ¿No me ves? Somos las verdades aparentes. Vamos al cine, a los cafés, a los bares; en ellos reclutamos a los que tienen vergüenza de ser y de no ser al mismo tiempo. Trabajamos mucho. La pobreza nos solicita continuamente en una época de tantas desilusiones. Ayudamos a crecer a las muchachas. ¿Así que nada consiguieron echándonos? Se rieron [. . .] apenas pensamos en la conciencia de los interesados; somos la pequeña mentira de los que no se quieren resignar. (341-341)5

Yet, there are still small spaces of resistance to be found: “La noche de la patria es abundantes de tejados, de luces. Si me vieran me dirían:

4 5

Allusion to Juan Panadero. Analagous the story “El retorno” by Segundo Serrano Poncela and anticipation of the return in the movie En el balcón vacío. See Naharro-Calderón “De vueltas de cárcel y exilio.”

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¡Vete!; pero no me ven. Únicamente la sonámbula nos ha reconocido. Yo también iba por los aleros, nos dice: He aquí la ciudad” (335). With these words, León begins to lay the groundwork for her theatrical text La libertad en el tejado, in which La Sonámbula plays a central role, personifying reason and liberty. In contrast to the city streets where nothing is recognizable, from the rooftops, the city becomes familiar again: Me hago toda ojos para reconocerla, de balcón a balcón, mientras mi caballo se tiende para pasar desapercibido. Miramos a la hondura de las casas. Hay patios con las cuerdas llenas de ropa y un sagrado incienso de hogar. Está todo en su sitio. Cada ventana corresponde a una vida. Ha sucedido sin que participemos: colgaron las lámparas y nacieron los niños, aprendieron a leer y se le rompió el primer juguete. Pero ahí está aún la sombra de mi puño cerrado. (336)

This image of her ‘closed fist’ references the hope that León still holds that there are still small pockets of resistance to the barbarism of the Franco regime, a theme that she explores further in La libertad en el tejado. Originally published in the magazine Encuentros in 1989, it was likely written at end of the 1940s or the beginning of the 1950s, an important detail because the first stage direction situates the act “en nuestros frágiles tejados. Época actual” (111). The focus of much of the first act is dedicated to contrasting the stage: the rooftop with the offstage: the street below, which represents the collective amnesia resulting from the repression and the official, imposed memories of the Franco regime. The rooftop, on the other hand, symbolizes resistance and Republican ideals. In this first act, residents of the rooftop look down, observing the Easter celebrations on the street below. Sabelotodo, who represents the collective memory and liberty lost following the Civil War, frequently critiques the same hypocrisy that the narrator of “Por aquí, por allá” had observed: “Lo véis, mujeres, bailan. Han olvidado todo. Los viajeros se hartan de decir: qué ciudad tan hermosa, relucen los cafés, los hombres desean a las hembras vestidas de raso. Lujo, vaivén, sonrisas, hambre, expoliación, crimen . . .” (120-121). The reality of daily life in Franco’s Spain remains hidden

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under superficial, touristic imagery: “¡Fuera lo castizo, lo folklórico, la miseria disimulada detrás de la belleza tradicional!” Additionally, he contrasts the lamentable situation of the inhabitants of the streets below, incognizant of the resistance of wartime Madrid: Calla. Me torturas. Nada de adormideras. Estoy viendo dormirse en pie a la gente bajo diferentes soporíferos. Y aquí, en mi tejado, no quiero sueños. ¿Somos o no somos? La calle es la calle; aquí, es aquí. Abajo que levanten el brazo, o los dos brazos, o los cuatro o que alarguen el cuello al yugo. Yo, permanezco. ¿Ya han perdido la memoria de lo que ocurrió? [. . .] ¡Santa simplicidad! Mejor, así no ven la miseria, ni las acciones complicadas de los beodos, ni me ven a mí . . . Tendrán que esperar otra ocasión para comprenderme. Yo también sueño y en ti, ¡oh impura ciudad convertida en tu sombra! ¡Capital de la gloria! ¡De nuestra gloria tambaleante, apuñalada! ¿No la veis? Ésta era la casa del Hombre crédulo, la vida podía florecer bajo la vieja verdad del trabajo . . . Se llamaba . . . ¡No quiero recordarlo! (122-123)

The discussion among the inhabitants of the rooftop is suddenly interrupted by two men in search of a fugitive that has escaped from prison. A former Republican soldier imprisoned following the war, he has fled to the rooftop in search of his freedom. Known only as El Hombre, he appears to symbolize all of Humanity, which has lost all sense of reason following two world wars and the Spanish Civil War. Upon his arrival to the rooftop, El Hombre meets La Sonámbula, who we previously met at the end of the story “Por aquí, por allá”. El Hombre says: “¡Qué bien se está aquí!” and La Sonámbula replies, applauding: “Eso dicen los hombres cuando me encuentran. ¡Pero me encuentran tan pocas veces! Parece que juego con ellos perpetuamente al escondite” (133). This encounter between El Hombre and La Sonámbula-Razón will be of short duration, interrupted in the second act by the arrival of a young couple to the rooftop. Despite being from a younger generation that has, for the most part, forgotten the legacy of the Second Republic, to León, they represent the hopes of the future. Their romantic relationship is reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet be-

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cause these characters, known only as La Chica and El Muchacho, come from families with opposing political ideals. El Muchacho tells La Chica: “Tus padres siempre fueron de la oposición. A mí me reprochan todos los días en mi casa que te veo. Me dicen que eres una muchacha de aquellos años terribles, y que . . . ningún amigo mío se acercaría a ti. Creen que estoy trastornado . . .” (143). La Chica, however, doesn’t waver in her ideals and replies: “Vete idiota. No te quiero perjudicar. Yo llevaré siempre un clavel rojo entre los dientes” (144).6 Following El Muchacho’s departure, la Chica meets el Hombre, who begins to vacillate between his feelings for La Sonámbula and those he feels for la Chica: “Parece que me enciende y apaga la razón” (163). Although La Sonámbula assures him: “Soy tu razón perdida” (170), he can’t resist the temptation of La Chica and responds: “No puedo soportarte más . . . Calla o . . . Por ti voy a perder la razón”. Then, with the sound of a gunshot, La Sonámbula falls from the stage, closing the second act of the play. In the third, the residents of the rooftop seek justice for the death of La Sonámbula by trying El Hombre for his crime. While the others mourn her loss, El Hombre asks why she was there and Sabelotodo tells him: “Como estás tú, buscando refugio. La expulsaban de todas partes” (176). El Hombre begins to doubt that he really killed her: “¿Y no estará dormida? ¿No será el sueño de la razón?”7 but Sabelotodo insists that El Hombre accept the reality of this actions: “La muerte tan sueño como la vida. Un pequeño guión los separa. Eso es todo. Pero tú lo que quieres es liberarte de los monstruos que la muerte de la razón despierta en tu conciencia. Levántate y compruébalo tú mismo” (177). It is during this act of the play that León appears to propose

6 It would be impossible to ignore the reference to Rafael Alberti’s Entre el clavel y la espada (1939-1940), his first collection of poems published in exile. According to Aznar Soler, the carnation in La libertad en el tejado is a symbol of resistance against fascism (144). Similarities to Alberti’s play De un momento a otro and Antonio Buero Vallejo’s Historia de una escalera should also be noted. 7 See Goya’s Capricho 43, “El sueño de la razón produce monstruos.”

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that the whole world has lost its Reason, emphasized in the following stage note: Maricastaña se arrodilla y de los ruedos de las sayas de Madame Pimentón van saliendo noticias internacionales de interés inmediato. Por ejemplo: Plan Truman, Ley de Sucesión de Franco, reunión de cancilleres en Moscú, discursos de [Henry A.] Wallace, todo mezclado con leves comentarios. Telegramas de Palestina, de Madagascar, del precio de la vida en una ciudad europea, etcétera. (185-186)

At the same time, La Sonámbula reappears, insisting: “La razón estaba perdida para el hombre” (184). Incredulous, El Hombre asks: “¿Para todos los hombres? ¿No la habíamos encontrado el sufrimiento total?” La Sonámbula: “El sufrimiento no ha engendrado más que la venganza, el recelo, la desconfianza hacia tus semejantes”. El Hombre: “Ésa es la Historia de la Humanidad que nos enseñaron ¿Tenemos otra?” La libertad en el tejado presents us with a vision of a broken world, characterized by violence. In the end, however, León offers a vision of hope. In the final scene of the play, El Muchacho returns to the rooftop, telling La Chica that he has come to see in spite of his family’s admonishment: “Sí, me llevo a rastras a la otra parte de mi generación, a la que lleva un clavel rojo entre sus dientes” (198). Upon observing the young couple reunite, Sabelotodo proclaims: “¡Otro ciclo histórico concluido!” As dawn breaks, La Chica announces her departure from the rooftop: “Sí, me voy para que la Humanidad vuelva a empezar”. With her symbolic departure from the rooftop, we can see the hope that León placed in the younger generation so that a new era may dawn for Spain. In his prologue to the most recent edition of Memoria de la melancolía, Benjamín Prado writes that there are few things more dangerous to an author than their most well-known work, as has happened with María Teresa León and her memoir (7). Additionally, he highlights the fact that it is often read as a complement to Rafael Alberti’s La arboleda perdida. I would argue for the value of studying Memoria de la melancolía as a stand-alone text, but I also consider it essential

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to read it as a complement to the numerous other texts written by León. Although she has long been overshadowed by her husband, all of these texts attest to the fact that María Teresa León was as politically and culturally engaged as Rafael Alberti. As our author and her texts receive more recognition, they will continue to provide us with valuable perspectives on the Second Republic, the Civil War and the Spanish Republican exile of 1939.

Works Cited Aznar Soler, Manuel. “Introducción.” María Teresa León, Teatro: La libertad en el tejado / Sueño y verdad de Francisco de Goya, edited by Manuel Aznar Soler. Sevilla: Renacimiento, 2003, pp. 9-106. Faber, Sebastiaan. Anglo-American Hispanists and the Spanish Civil War. Basinstoke: Palgrave, 2008. — “Economies of Prestige: The Place of Iberian Studies in the American University.” Hispanic Research Journal 9.1 (2008), pp. 7-32. — “¿Quién pelea contra el invierno? El revisionismo de Jordi Gracia.” Migraciones y Exilios 11 (2010), pp. 155-162. Ferris, José Luis. Palabras contra el olvido. Vida y obra de María Teresa León (1903-1988). Sevilla: Fundación José Manuel Lara, 2017. Gracia, Jordi. A la intemperie: exilio y cultura en España. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2010. Ilie, Paul. Literature and Inner Exile: Authoritarian Spain, 1939-1975. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. La Capra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. León, María Teresa. Fábulas del tiempo amargo y otros relatos, edited by Gregorio Torres Nebrera. Madrid: Cátedra, 2003. — La libertad en el tejado / Sueño y verdad de Francisco de Goya, edited by Manuel Aznar Soler. Sevilla: Renacimiento, 2003. — Memoria de la melancolía. Madrid: Castalia, 1998. Naharro-Calderón, José María. “De vueltas de cárcel y exilio.” Letras peninsulares 11.1 (1998), pp. 299-311.

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— Entre alambradas y exilios. Sangrías de las Españas y terapias de Vichy. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2017. — Entre el exilio y el interior: El “entresiglo” y Juan Ramón Jiménez. Barcelona: Anthropos, 1994. Prado, Benjamín. “Prólogo”. Memoria de la melancolía. Sevilla: Renacimiento, 2020. Torres Nebrera, Gregorio. “Introducción”. Fábulas del tiempo amargo y otros relatos. Madrid: Cátedra, 2003.

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Carmen de Zulueta: Creating and Recreating Memories as a Spanish Republican Woman through her USA Exile Nélida Devesa-Gómez Howard University

Although stories of one’s life written by women have been part of literary history for several centuries–the first known in Spanish was written by Leonor López de Córdoba in 1401, it was not until the 1970s that they began to be studied through an academic prism, and not until the 80s that they were consolidated as a specific field of study. This has been seen in Spanish Republican exile studies, where great interest in women’s memoirs has arisen.1 However, there is still essential work to be done to understand the richness of possibilities that these women writers offer. Here I will analyze how the unstudied Spanish Republi-

1

See Alted, Aristizábal, Martínez, Mejía Ruiz and Piñeiro Domínguez, and Scott, among others.

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can identity of Carmen de Zulueta (Madrid, 1916-2010) merges with her life recollections in Spain as an exiled woman in the United States in two of her posthumously published memoirs: La España que pudo ser: Memorias de una institucionista [The Spain that Could Have Been: Memories of a Republican Institutionist] (2000) and Mi vida en España (1916-1936) [My Life in Spain (1916-1936)] (2011).2 Carmen de Zulueta was born in Madrid into a family of intellectuals and was raised under the precepts of la ILE (Institución Libre de Enseñanza [Free Institution for Education])3 and the Second Spanish Republic. In fact, the family was visiting their father, Luis de Zulueta, ambassador of the Second Spanish Republic to the Holy See in the Vatican, the summer that the Spanish Civil War broke out.4 These circumstances would determine the rest of their lives, since many of them would never return to Spain. While her family was divided between France and Colombia, the young Carmen moved to Greenwich, England, to work as a Spanish instructor for two years. She rejoined her family in Colombia (where she obtained a doctorate in Philosophy and Letters), later traveling to Brazil and the United States, which ultimately became her home and permanent residence (NYC) until the end of her life. There she received her master’s degree in Spanish Literatures and later, a PhD, with a thesis entitled Navarro Ledesma, el hombre y su tiempo [Navarro Ledesma, the Man and his Time], directed by Spanish exiled writer Francisco Ayala. She later dedicated herself to teaching at Lehman College until 1984. After retiring, she devoted her days to writing about pre-war Spain, telling the stories of the regions and the people who were close and influential in her life, like her father or her uncle, Julián Besteiro, a PSOE [Spanish Socialist Workers Party] politician and professor, who had stayed in Madrid during the Civil War, and died in 1940 due to health hardships in a Francoist prison.

2 3 4

All translations into English are mine. See Jiménez-Landi. Luis de Zulueta was a Republican journalist, reformist and politician that served the Second Spanish Republic in different roles, such as minister and ambassador.

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Her memoirs span two other volumes: Compañeros de paseo [Walking Companions] (2001), Caminos de España y América [Roads in Spain and America] (2004). Although the four texts follow a similar structure as a series of autobiographical essays, here I will only focus on the first (2000) and last (2011). They present a more traditional memoir format as the arrangement of the chapters focus on the author and her life experiences; whereas the other two are comprised of essays with different protagonists, and Zulueta as narrator and witness to their various interactions.5 Zulueta insists on clarifying the genre in which she delves for her recollections: “no es este libro mi autobiografía, ya que no me considero lo bastante importante para llamarlo así. Es, simplemente, una colección de recuerdos de mi vida y de las gentes que fueron parte importante de ella” [“this book is not my autobiography, since I do not consider myself important enough for that task. It is simply a collection of memories of my life and the people who were an important part of it”] (La España 13). Several significant aspects stand out from this statement. First, we can extrapolate the difference that these texts represent for our author, making a clear distinction between autobiography and memoirs, considering the former the life portrait of a relevant figure, among which she does not include herself. Second, she emphasizes her perception of memoirs as a collection of recollections from a specific time in her life rather than the detailed monitoring of it, thus proposing her own definition of the memoir genre. Finally, she highlights the relevance of social factors: she does not stand out as the protagonist, but rather places specific moments in her life on the same plane as other protagonists. Each element affects her own perception as another voice within the exiled collectivity which should not remain in oblivion. Therefore, Zulueta details her motivations for writing on several occasions. In La España she asserts: “desde hace varios años, al hablar con amigos míos españoles y con colegas en la Universidad de la Ciudad, y contarles recuerdos de cuando yo era chica, muchos me dijeron

5

See Lejeune and Montiel Rayo for different memoir strategies.

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que debería escribirlos, ya que tanta gente de varias generaciones españolas no conoce nada de lo que fue la España antes de Franco” [“for several years, when speaking with my Spanish friends and colleagues from CUNY, and sharing recollections about my childhood, many told me that I should write them down, since so many Spaniards from several generations do not know anything about their country before Franco”] (13). Therefore, the author responds to a request for knowledge and stands as the source of her own story and anecdotes, and as a witness of her surroundings in Madrid. In the dedication of Mi vida, she adds: “Este breve libro está dedicado a Isaías y a John, ya que, sin su interés y sus repetidas instancias para que lo escribiera, nunca lo habría escrito” [“This short book is dedicated to Isaías and John, since, without their interest and their repeated requests to write it, I would never have written it.”]6 Hence, this lack of predisposition to write could be interpreted as an undermining of her own author[ity], and yet an affirmation of her archival knowledge that carried her throughout her USA refuge, where a Republican exilic identity would shape her forever. Another justification for writing may be linked to the early feminine tradition of “life writing”, such as Libros de las moradas o Castillo interior [The Books of Mansions or The Interior Castle] by Saint Teresa of Ávila. In this tradition, women writers need to validate their discourse through a male authority figure. However, I consider that Zulueta’s reasons go beyond this trope. Instead of hiding in her writing behind a position of dependence, she displays the insistence of potential readers for stories about the existential tragedy that forced her compatriots to abandon their home due to the war and the dictatorship. Her exiled condition colors her story and the new composed archive, as well as the role of memory within these. In fact, Zulueta’s work is not determined according to her own gender, but rather her narrative voice, which is shaped by her Spanish Republican and exiled identities. Joanne Frye states that due to the

6

Zulueta refers to her son, John de Zulueta Greenebaum, and her friend and colleague, the Hispanist Isaías Lerner.

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historical silencing of women’s voices, they develop new dimensions of representation: “the speaking ‘I’ claims her identity in process; in becoming the interpreter of her own experience, she also claims both her femaleness and her autonomous self-definition” (76). Through her memoirs, Zulueta gradually manifests the elements that present her origins, her life journey, her voyage into exile, as well as her way of reading and writing, as an identification with the Second Spanish Republic and exile. Therefore, she develops new modes of representation that do not have to be limited to the female gender, but rather build a more complex whole in which the author claims a specific place in literary history through the writing of her memories. The Second Spanish Republic and exile make up the pillars of her narrative voice and are gradually revealed through her life stories in La España que pudo ser: Memorias de una institucionista [The Spain that Could Have Been: Memories of a Republican Institutionist] (2000). On the one hand, through her gaze, she presents Spain as another protagonist: not just any Spain, but “la que pudo ser” [“the one that could have been”]. That is, the one they had to abandon for exile, and the one that lost its opportunity to reach its full potential as a republic because of the military coup. On the other hand, in the subtitle, she does refer to herself, by means of the adjectives “institucionista” [“Institutionist”] and “republicana” [“Republican”]. As an Institutionist she is referring to the ILE, the pedagogical organization that tried to renew the foundations of education in Spain through the liberal ideas of the time, analogously to those of 20th-century Europe, as well as being closely connected to the programs of the Second Spanish Republic. The Republican adjective marks her political affiliation, her vision of the world, and personal experiences. Even though the government of the Republic was usurped in 1939, the protagonist continues to be part of it, in the distance, existence and recollections from her USA exile. The construction of Carmen de Zulueta’s narrative identity is linked to her own references through her memoir. She never refers only to her woman gender, except when thinking of moments in her childhood or youth, through an adjective that carries other information. Moreover, she hardly alludes to herself in adulthood, since she

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resorts to verbal constructions with the first person personal pronoun, or shifts her attention to the actions of specific images within her memory personification. On the occasions when she does speak of herself through adjectives or substantiated adjectives, “exiled” and “republican” sparkle through her discourse. In the introduction she states: “Espero también que estas viñetas . . . den al lector una idea de aquella España, atrasada e idealista, de antes de 1936, y de las vicisitudes de una joven exiliada para ganarse humildemente la vida en una Europa que veía con buenos ojos las dictaduras de Hitler y Mussolini y que apoyaba la de Franco” [“I also hope that these vignettes . . . give the reader an idea of that Spain, backward and idealistic, before 1936, and of the vicissitudes of a young exile humbly making a living in a Europe that welcomed the dictatorships of Hitler and Mussolini and that supported Franco’s”] (La España 13). With a footnote, she adds that she intentionally uses the word exiliada “porque así la escribíamos los que nos fuimos al exilio en 1936” [“because that’s how those of us who went into exile considered ourselves in 1936”] (La España 13).7 In this preamble, she leaves no room for doubt: this is the story of an exile, thus positioning herself in a specific place in the history of Spain, from the otherness of exile and gender in the USA. When combining the relationship between memory and exiles, the displaced philosopher María Zambrano points out that we are dealing with, [una] “memoria que rescata” [a] [“memory that rescues”] (Carta): the grounding for their testimony. In these volumes, Zulueta’s memory (and thus herself ) transform themselves into testimony. Precisely, in the paratexts of the two volumes studied here, different voices arise praising the author’s abilities to remember, as if they were only one: “[dotada] de una memoria histórica compleja, poderosísima” [“(endowed) with a complex, overpowerful historical memory”] (Pascual Maragall in La España) or “Carmen tiene . . . una memoria asombrosa” [“Carmen has . . . an amazing memory”] (Fernando Millán Romeral in Mi vida). Thus, her

7

In fact, refugee was prevalent in front of exile, only accepted later by the Republicans through the Latin American usage of the gallicism.

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memory becomes an entity unto itself as a creator and developer of essential contents. Memory in Zulueta is a concept where different functions and meanings fit. It is equally the impetus of the story, an individual entity, and of course, the genre that frames her contributions. However, in addition to these possible meanings, memory creates a structure that underpins the narrative, and that consolidates three levels of meaning around three notions of its semantic field: “memoria” [“memory”], “recuerdo” [“recollection”] and “recordar” [“to remember”]. These concepts, which acquire specific meanings, are reiterated in an overwhelming way in La España and are attenuated in the later text, as if memories by themselves took on a greater role with respect to the mediation of the narrator. The first of these concepts, “memory” is an entity of remembrance. Zulueta presents it, endowing it with a certain independence from herself: a trunk full of stories at her disposal. With the use of the third person, she personifies herself as “vieja” [“old”] but “fotográfica” [“photographic”] and “en technicolor” [“in technicolor”]. Time has not broken her ability to transport images from the past to the present. Throughout her writings, her memory is portrayed as a close and faithful companion. The independence given to the memory as a character creates a distance between Zulueta-the author and Zuluetathe protagonist, which emphasizes the determination of objectivity inherent in the memoirs genre. “Recollection”, on the other hand, is not limited to its meaning as a picture of a past event. In Zulueta’s narratives, it refers to specific moments of great relevance within the existence of the narrator. For example, when reminiscing about a walk with her uncle, she states: “Este recuerdo vive muy claro en mi memoria, asociado al entierro de Cossío que vimos pasar debajo de nuestros balcones” [“This recollection lives very vividly in my memory, associated with Cossío’s funeral procession which we saw passing by under our balconies”] (Mi vida 141).8 The

8

Zulueta mentions Manuel Bartolomé Cossío (1857-1935), a key figure in education in Spain and an art historian, who devoted himself to the Free Institution of Education, being the successor of Francisco Giner de los Ríos.

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“recollection” in the singular here is prominent and presents a poignant image (although at first it seems like a routine event). If frames the narration with considerable information about the aspects that determine the identity of the author, especially as a girl, and in relation to her family. The “recollection” becomes a piece that fits into the memory compartment, the former being at the service of the latter, since memory has the power to choose and accentuate one image over another. In the same way, the verb “recordar” [“to remember”] becomes another pillar of the narrative, at the same level as the recollection, since on the occasions when the author uses it, it eliminates the mediation of her ally in the third person, and she immerses herself as a narratorcharacter within the story. Strikingly, the verb “to remember” has its own location in the sentence, always at the beginning, in the first person singular present tense, since it is an intimate action that starts from the now in order to reveal the past: “Recuerdo las visitas que los domingos hacía uno de nosotros a casa de mi tía Lola, mi tío Julián [Besteiro], su marido y mi tía Mercedes, su cuñada, para comer con ellos” [“I remember the visits that one of us made on Sundays to my aunt Lola, my uncle Julián [Besteiro], her husband, and my aunt Mercedes, her sister-in-law, to eat with them”] (La España 24). The inclusion of the self in that image makes the events she narrates closer, and at the same time, implies a personal perspective, since they come directly from the narrator, and break the illusion of objectivity. In the narrative structure of memory, “recollection” is also reflected in the learning by heart process during the author’s childhood. Thus, this procedure on memory is circular, since the main part, the storeroom of memory, acts as a container of recollection where the image of learning by heart is contained. Zulueta dedicates several sections of the text to depicting how in the ILE (and later in el Instituto Escuela [the School Institute]) instruction in the abstract was discarded in favor of practical teaching. Unlike in the educational system that dominated in Spain at that time, the students did not have books to memorize; however, this did not suppress the concern and exercise of memory. On the contrary, she tells us how in Mr. Blanco’s literature class these skills were cultivated: “La tarea del señor Blanco era escribir esas poesías en la pizarra, con su preciosa letra . . . Estas poesías bien

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copiadas y hasta ilustradas con tarjetas postales que nos daba el señor Blanco eran nuestro libro de texto de literatura. Aprendíamos estas poesías de memoria” [“Mr. Blanco’s task was to write these poems on the blackboard, in his precious handwriting. . . These well-recopied poems that were even illustrated with postcards that Mr. Blanco gave us were our literature textbooks. We learned these poems by heart.”] (Mi vida 65) This image, which focuses on the cultivation of memory, describes in detail the care put into the entire process, from the observation and understanding of the content to be retained, that is, poetry, through its written reproduction, and, as indicated later, its oral delivery, resulting in the recitation of the poems. This practice influences the author’s way of perceiving reality, and her attention to detail in order to be able to reproduce them naturally. It also involves a certain repetition. This reiteration has a pleasant connotation, while it transports the narrator and reader to another mental state. In Zulueta, this is already perceived from the chapter titles that organize the chronology of each volume, since they not only allude to the same spaces, but correspond practically to the exact chapter headings. Thus, in La España one finds: “Veraneo político: Redondela” [“Political Summer: Redondela”], and in Mi vida, “Redondela, verano político” [“Redondela, Political Summer”]. And later on: “Veraneo con catedral: Ávila” [“Summer with a Cathedral: Ávila”] and “Ávila, veraneo con catedral” [“Ávila, Summer with a Cathedral”]. However, the most striking element is the insistence on the stories told, since the author highlights repeatedly specific moments. As an illustration, two fragments from both titles, discussed here, relate in a similar way the same anecdote during a summer the family spent in San Vicente de la Barquera (Santander). Recuerdo también el “rayo verde”. Mi padre nos decía que, si mirábamos al sol cuando se ponía sobre el agua azul-verde del Cantábrico, en el momento en que se ocultaba el último pedacito del sol rojo, salía del agua un rayo verde . . . hace muchos años fui a ver una película del director francés, Eric Röhmer, llamada Le rayon vert, con escenas filmadas en San Sebastián, (sic) y con la escena final —los protagonistas sentados en

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Nélida Devesa-Gómez un muro en la playa de La Concha (sic)— y el famoso rayo verde de mi infancia surgía del mar rojizo [I also remember the “green ray”. My father told us that, if we looked at the sun when it would set over the blue-green water of the Cantabrian Sea, at the moment when the last bit of the red sun were to hide, a green ray would come out of the water . . . many years ago I went to see a film by the French director, Eric Röhmer, called Le rayon vert, with scenes filmed in San Sebastian (sic), and in the final scene —the protagonists sitting on a wall in La Concha beach (sic)— while the famous green ray of my childhood emerged from the reddish sea.] (La España 52) Nuestro padre nos hacía sentir la belleza del paisaje a la puesta de sol: ‘Si miráis al horizonte, cuando el sol se pone, veréis brillar un rayito verde’ . . . Hace muchos años me interesó mucho una película francesa, Le rayon vert, filmada en la costa española del País Vasco, (sic) tal vez en San Sebastián (sic). Los protagonistas veían el rayo verde. [Our father made us feel the beauty of the landscape at sunset: If you look at the horizon, when the sun sets, you will see a little green ray shine. . . Many years ago I was very interested in a French film, Le rayon vert, filmed on the Spanish coast of the Basque Country (sic), perhaps in San Sebastián (sic). The protagonists saw the green ray.] (Mi vida 61)

These very similar fragments reveal how the same story returns and is transformed over the years through the narrator’s memory, although in an almost obligatory way, she recounts the essential details in both: the presence of the green ray and the connection with the French director’s film. The first passage presents details of the routine as well as the process of combining colors in the landscape. In the second, she dedicates a line to settle the matter, introducing it as the father’s desire to transmit to his children the excellence of the area’s natural sights. Likewise, the former presents it as “the green ray”, unique and remarkable, compared to the latter, which refers to it as “a little green ray”, with a reduced intensity. Regarding the film, the close relationship and the painted image are transformed. In the first, it is “a film” with details about the location, compared to the second where Le rayon vert consists of a work that really appealed to her, without nam-

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ing its director, and where the shooting location is a guess. Thus, the excerpts also show how the author’s relationship to affection within her writing is transformed over the course of eleven years. In fact, if we pay attention to the content, Mi vida is a rewriting of the first half of La España. The latter recounts specific recollections associated with spaces, from her childhood (exploring her family’s ancestors), going through her exile journey until her settlement in New York City, while the former only depicts her time in Spain, until her visit to Rome and the beginning of exile. Why does the author write the same stories repeatedly? On the one hand, repetition becomes an automatic process, since these specific moments are inescapable points within her life path. They allow us to understand the connection with her father, the presence of culture in her life, the possibility of uniting vital moments with fictional scenes. But at the same time, the reiteration contains a pleasant foundation for coming back to specific moments which provoke certain feelings. I believe that this insistent rewriting dialogues with Zambrano’s idea that “el exilio es un lugar privilegiado para que la Patria se descubra” [“exile is a privileged place for the Homeland to be discovered”] (Los Bienaventurados 43). Through continuous remembrance and its expression on paper, the past comes to life, different details appear and come together like a puzzle and give rise to the recreated motherland. Specifically, for Zulueta, her homeland is Spain before the war and the dictatorship: a childhood paradise where her antics and visions are mediated by nostalgia, under the bend of the parental zeal. This appeal to childhood is a common resource in the memories of exile and the dictatorship, because through these “major” events, a door is opened to the routine of the past, to the real life of time. For the narrator, each recollection is also an approximation to this specific chronotope, i.e. being able to relive it in such a way that the action of writing becomes a performative act (Loureiro). In addition, her remembering process, which transforms and highlights diverse aspects in each return to the same image, uncovers layers about the author’s narrative identity, her own sentimental relationship with her memories as the years go by, and even how her memory-character evolves. In Mi vida, Zulueta asserts from a contemporary USA frame-

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work: “Seguí siendo republicana todos los años de destierro y hoy me siento republicana” [“I remained a Republican all the years of exile and today I still feel as a Republican”] (34). As she attempted to create accurate recollections, while continuously recreating herself through them, Zulueta’s Spanish Republican and exilic identities in the USA kept themselves alive in her heart.

Works Cited Alted, Alicia. “El exilio republicano español de 1939 desde la perspectiva de las mujeres.” Arenal. Revista de historia de las mujeres 4.2, Jul.-Dec., (1997), pp. 223-238. — La voz de los vencidos: El exilio republicano de 1939. Madrid: Aguilar, 2005. Aristizábal Montes, Patricia. Autobiografía de mujeres. Caldas: Universidad de Caldas, 2004. Frye, Joanne S. Living Stories, Telling Lives: Women and the Novel in Contemporary Experience. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1986. Jiménez-Landi, Antonio. La Institución Libre de Enseñanza y su ambiente. Madrid: Taurus, 1973. Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography, edited by Paul John Eakin. Translated by Katherine Margaret Leary. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Loureiro, Ángel G. The Ethics of Autobiography: Replacing the Subject in Modern Spain. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000. Martínez, Josebe. Exiliadas: escritoras, guerra civil y memoria. Barcelona: Montesinos, 2007. Mejía Ruiz, Carmen y Piñeiro Domínguez, María Jesús (eds.). Voces de escritoras olvidadas. Antología de la guerra civil española y del exilio. Salamanca: Guillermo Escolar, 2021. Montiel Moncayo, Francisca (ed.). Las escrituras del yo. Diarios, autobiografías, memorias y epistolarios del exilio republicano de 1939. Sevilla: Renacimiento, 2018.

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Scott, JoanW.: “El eco de la fantasía: la historia y la construcción de la identidad.” Ayer 62, 2006. Zambrano, María. “Carta sobre el exilio.” Cuadernos del Congreso por la Libertad de la Cultura, 1961, pp. 65-70. — Los bienaventurados. Madrid: Siruela, 2003. Zulueta, Carmen de. Caminos de España y América. Madrid: Residencia de Estudiantes, 2004. — Compañeros de paseo. Sevilla: Renacimiento, 2001. — La España que pudo ser. Memorias de una institucionalista republicana. Murcia: Universidad de Murcia, 2000. — Mi vida en España (1916-1936). Barcelona: Plataforma, 2011.

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Manuel Durán and Roberto Ruiz: Exiled Writers in the USA María Gómez-Martín California State University San Marcos

The 80th anniversary of the tragedy of the Spanish Republican exile of 1939 opens the road to revisiting the contributions of many Spaniards in the Americas and the United States, in order to try to fill some of the gaps, silences and emptiness left in the collective memory. On this occasion, I am going to focus on the American journey of Roberto Ruiz and Manuel Durán, two authors that reflect on their memories, alienation, and identity crisis as children of the Spanish Civil War. Their search for answers will become a constant in their life, to the point of accepting their exilic circumstance as a condition of their own being. Over the course of the 20th century, the concept of war evolved and shaped every aspect of the lives not only of those who suffered it, but also of the generations after. However, there’s a big difference between parents and children. The former were always aware

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of their ideals and their struggle; the latter, inherited their parents’ fate without questioning it. In that regard, Peter Townsend in El grito de los niños [The children’s cry] affirms: “Of all the calamities that could unexpectedly afflict a child, nothing is worse than suffering without knowing why. A man knows why he goes to war and what his role is. A child doesn’t” (16).1 Children are and have always been the largest unknown group in armed conflicts. The surviving children of any war will drag with them for the rest of their days the physical and psychological consequences of such a terrible experience: hunger, fear, family separations, imprisonment, humiliation, destruction, exile or even death. Surviving an armed conflict, regardless of the country or historical moment, is essential for the reconstruction of a historiographical discourse that includes not only the version of the victors, but also that of the defeated. In our case, the Spanish Civil War caused the mass escape of thousands of Republicans and the largest exodus of children in Europe until then. But in Spain, the first sociological and historical works focused on the experience of these children were only produced in the 1980s. Maurice Halbwachs (On Collective Memory) analyzes the relationship between memory and history, defining memory as a discourse of the past transmitted by social groups that are still alive, while history refers to the representation that takes place once these groups have disappeared. This theory points out how the disappearance of witnesses leaves historians with traces of a past that is impossible to recover. For that reason, it is extremely important to rescue and study the work of this generation of “children”, as they are the last generation of 1939 witnesses still alive. Unfortunately, as time passes, we are also losing them, and therefore, their voices, memories, and experiences.

1

Translations from all quotes are mine (Spanish-English). Original quotation: “De todas las calamidades que pueden sobrevenir a un niño, no hay otra peor que hacerle sufrir y morir ignorando el motivo. Un hombre sabe más o menos por qué va a la guerra. Un niño, no” (16).

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In this context, we may refer to the Second Exile generation as those children of Spanish refugees born in the homeland between 1924 and 1939, forced to go into exile with their families when they were still children or adolescents. Since the publication, in 1980, in the Peña Labra magazine, of the first poetic anthology dedicated to this group (Segunda generación de poetas españoles del exilio mexicano), this term (second generation) has been used the most often. However, the terminology to describe them is extensive and even today they are better known as the “hispanomexicanos”, or “Nepantla” generation–a Nahuatl word first used by Francisco de la Maza that means “land in between” or in the middle. Some members of the group also came up with different names, such as “border generation” by Nuria Parés2 or, as Carlos Blanco Aguinaga calls his partners, an “amphibious” generation, since they are always swimming between two shores. The reason is obvious: “they are Spanish, and they are Mexican, but they are neither Spanish nor Mexican. They do not know very well what their role in exile is, but they feel it is important. Their exile is an inheritance, accepted in almost all cases; but in any case, it is not the product of their history” (Gambarte 16). For these children, Mexico became their new “home”, a place that suggested future and hope. Unlike for their parents, the image of Spain for the children of the second generation was vague and weaker due to distance, the passage of time, and their lack of rational memory. Paradoxically, these children were educated in Mexico and attended schools specifically designed for them to keep alive the Republican values of their parents and educators. The strong family, educational, and cultural bonds they grew up with made their adaptation and assimilation into Mexican society more difficult. They were

2

In the poem “Canto a los míos” from the poetry book Canto llano, Parés admits that “We were less than the dream / of a border generation” “Fuimos menos que el sueño / de una generación, la fronteriza” (69). The same expression of “border men” was later used by Luis Rius in his article “Los españoles en México: historia de una doble personalidad,” where he affirmed: “we are border beings like lizards and poets” (“somos seres fronterizos como los lagartos y como los poetas”) (6).

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almost “forced” to be and feel Spanish, and it is worth mentioning that some of them also left Mexico to find a new opportunities and freedom in the United States. In that regard, Carlos Blanco Aguinaga has acknowledged, when talking about their parents and educators that: “For them, we were what was left from Spain. We were their own nostalgia”3 (qtd. in Rivera, Última voz 17), or José Pascual Buxó: “None of them would have ever allowed us to forget our origin and traditions, and we were facing a horrible dilemma: be faithful to Spain —a blurry, almost imaginary Spain— or be considered traitors” (8).4 That’s why the children felt somehow responsible for following their parents’ legacy, even if it was just a paradox because they left Spain too early to feel and consider themselves Spanish, but they arrived in Mexico too late to grow up being fully Mexican. The impossibility of belonging to this distant and absent homeland, and, at the same time, the impossibility of separating themselves from it, opened a new possibility for them: to institutionalize their nostalgia. Since they couldn’t live in Spain or forget about it, these children grew up and decided to turn their nostalgic experience into a profession and become writers. This way, literature becomes a way to narrate their memories of Spain and their life in exile as well as to reflect and try to overcome their identity conflicts. They admit to having an amphibious nature, constantly changeable. And they grew up with the idea that, in order to mature both personally and professionally, they “had to” define their own specific nationality. José de la Colina, a noted storyteller in the group, reproduced in his blog Correo Fantasma the following conversation he had with one of his Mexican classmates when he was still in school.

3 4

“Para ellos éramos lo que quedaba de España. Éramos su propia nostalgia.” “Ninguno de ellos (los padres) hubiera consentido jamás que olvidáramos nuestro origen y nuestras tradiciones, así que fuimos colocados ante un dilema desesperante: ser fieles a España —a una España nebulosa, casi imaginaria—, o ser tenidos por traidores.”

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— Spain, Mexico . . . where are you from? — I come from exile, as if it were a country. — What? — Better, I came from exile as if from a country. — So . . . are you Spanish, Mexican, or what? — I’m from neither here, not there, as the song says. I am from the country called Exile.

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— De España, de México . . . ¿de dónde eres? — Soy del exilio como de un país. — ¿Cómo? — O, mejor dicho, fui del exilio como de un país. — Entonces, tú ¿eres español o mexicano o qué? — Ni soy de aquí, ni soy de allá, como dice la canción. Soy del país del Exilio.

This way of understanding the status of exile as a “country” or even a nationality allows the creation of a new space of representation that specifically arises in the marginal, peripheral, and subaltern position in which these children found themselves, that is, somewhere in the middle between Spain and Mexico, as interpreted in conjunction with Homi Bhabha’s third space concept, characterized by its difference, hybridity and otherness. We can see that as these children grew up, and went to the University (mainly UNAM to study Humanities) in the 1950s, and due to the influence of French existentialists, the exile acquired a new existential transfiguration as well as a profound and complex introspection aimed at understanding it not as topic or leitmotif of their works but as the condition of their own being. This is going to be particularly relevant for Manuel Durán and Roberto Ruiz, two authors who came to the USA, reluctant to be confined to one place or one culture. As Ruiz himself states, he lived a triple transnational exile: the first took him with his family from Spain to Mexico and the second to the United States, where he has spent most of his personal and professional life. Both Ruiz and Durán were born in the same year, 1925.5 For them, the issue of identity transcends the Spain-Mexico binomial

5

Unfortunately, Durán passed away in April 2020, and I haven’t been able to corroborate Ruiz’s condition.

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by taking the experience of exile to another level, as an interpretation of human life. Manuel Durán was born in Barcelona on March 28, 1925. Son of an important Republican lawyer, he fled with his family from fascist Spain in 1939. They lived in France, but managed to leave, from Montpellier to Marseille and from there to Casablanca, in order to finally arrive in Veracruz, Mexico in 1942. In Mexico, Manuel Durán earned his undergraduate degrees in Law, Philosophy, and Literature from the University of Mexico (UNAM) and became a simultaneous translator for the United Nations, before engaging in the most important journey of his professional life: The United States. He received his doctorate in Spanish Literature at Princeton University in 1953, got his first job as an academic at Smith College, and, after a few years, joined the Yale faculty in 1960, where he remained until his retirement, after being granted the Emeritus status at that institution. He became an authority on the Spanish Golden Age, especially Cervantes and Quevedo. His prolific work includes 40 books (authored and coauthored) and more than 200 articles on Hispanic writers and poets, paying special attention to Catalan artists, both in exile and in the mainland. It is also worth mentioning that in 1981 he was named a knight of the Order of Isabella the Catholic, with the rank of commander, for his work in favor of the dissemination of Spanish culture in the USA. He proudly displays his medal, but also recognizes that “It has never occurred to me to ask people to address me as Commander Durán because that would be too pretentious, way too pretentious.” “And besides, in politics, I’ve never been a royalist” (Durán, “Yale Professor emeritus”).6 Manuel Durán has affirmed that “even for those best adapted to exile, nostalgia can rebound at any time. It’s like malaria: you can

6 In September 2015 the North American Academy of the Spanish Language (ANLE) awarded him the Enrique Anderson Imbert Prize, for his constant excellence as a critic, researcher, poet and university professor who had contributed to the knowledge and dissemination of the Pan-Hispanic language, letters and culture in the United States.

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never be sure if you are completely cured or not, and in the long run you don’t mind being cured. On the contrary, many of us have institutionalized our nostalgia. Since we couldn’t live in Spain nor forget about it, we have chosen to turn this situation into a profession” (qtd. in Marra López 6).7 This was the case of most of them, who chose the path of writing as a profession and used literature as a vehicle for expressing their experiences, their thoughts and their memories of Spain and exile; a solid bond capable of resisting the passage of time, because the power of memory lies in the possibility and strength of recreation, of making presence of the absence, of the past, the present and even the future. It is worth mentioning that in Durán’s work there is no explicit reference to exile nor is the word Spain ever cited. This can surprise us because in an interview in 1974, talking about himself and his peers of the second generation, Durán said that the exile “had been the ingredient of everything we said, thought, and wrote, an undeniable signature of our activity” (qtd. in Rivera, “Los motivos del desterrado” 138). These words pose a real challenge to his readers and the critics, since we feel the obligation of finding that secretly hidden “ingredient” in his verses. In “Exhortación a un poeta perezoso” (qtd. in Rivera, Última voz, 66)8 the issue of personal identity is questioned using the symbol of the “song” and recurring images such as the mirror and passport to characterize the individual. According to Durán, “if you don’t sing you don’t exist”:

7

8

“Incluso para el mejor adaptado al destierro, la nostalgia puede rebrotar en cualquier momento. Es como el paludismo: uno no sabe a ciencia cierta si está curado del todo o no, y a la larga ya no le importa curarse. Al contrario: muchos de nosotros hemos institucionalizado nuestra nostalgia. No podíamos vivir en España ni olvidar España: hemos optado por convertir esta situación, angustiosa como tal, en profesión.” Durán’s poems have been selected from Susana Rivera’s anthology, Última voz del exilio, with the exception of those from Viento del sol.

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An old proverb says: if you don’t sing, you don’t exist. You don’t know who you are, you don’t know your face, […] Your song defines you, from your voice come birds and whirlpools, uncertain lightning, clouds decorated with stars and breezes. Your voice is a mirror, it finally gives you your name. […] Your voice is your refuge, only passport to the land of man, ....................................................... Without your voice, without your singing, the dawn does not catch fire, water does not cleanse you, wine does not exalt you. Without your singing you don’t exist. […] Nor do those who heard your voice

Dice un viejo proverbio: si no cantas no existes. No sabes ni quién eres, no conoces tu rostro, […] Tu canto te define, de tu voz se desprenden aves y remolinos, relámpagos inciertos, nubes condecoradas con estrellas y brisas. Tu voz es un espejo, te da por fin tu nombre. […] Tu voz es tu morada, único pasaporte a la tierra del hombre, ....................................................... Sin tu voz, sin tu canto, el alba no se incendia, el agua no te limpia, el vino no te exalta. Sin tu canto no existes. […] Como tampoco existen los que tu voz oían.

The poem ends with a Cernudian reference to the “other” since only through its recognition, it can come to exist: “without your singing you do not exist / nor do those who heard your voice.” Durán’s poetic discourse, decentralized and unfolded, manages to uncover and encompass in the otherness of his verses a “we” who seems to be inscribed in the existence of the exiled community to which he belongs. Hence, the anguish for not being able to define his identity becomes a constant theme in his work, with Durán even expressing it in one of his last short poems. In just three verses Durán is able to convey the search for the past-present self in the figure of the other due to the impossibility of self-recognition: “Tell me who you are / Instead, I cannot . . . / I keep changing” (El viento del sol 54).9 9

“Dime quién eres / En cambio, yo no puedo . . . / Sigo cambiando.”

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Throughout his work, Manuel Durán faces his past and does so with horror and fascination. A reaction as intense and complex as Durán’s cannot be attributed only to the desire to return to the lost paradise of childhood, as there must be something else that justifies his feeling of loss, the search for a center, the excessive restlessness produced by his uncontrollable memory. And that reason can only be exile, which can work as the ingredient of his writing: not the only one, of course, but the one responsible for the intensity of his desolation, his intimate restlessness and the configuration of some very special symbols such as “the center,” likely metaphor of the “settlement, and the roots” and the “island” that suggests the loneliness of the exiled (Rivera, “Motivos” 142). In any case, we can read Durán’s poetry as a manifestation of existential attitudes common to all human beings: the anguish over time, the lack of meaning of life, the uncertainty and loneliness caused by all this, and they constitute what are usually called the “eternal themes” of the poetry of exile. It is possible that the Durán-poet asks the readers to look deeper if we want to meet the Durán-persona, because although his poetry deals with eternal themes, if we want to find his true meaning, we must observe them from the perspective of exile. On the other hand, Roberto Ruiz was born in Madrid in 1925, and like Durán, he fled from Spain with his family in 1939. He’s lived in France, the Dominican Republic, Mexico and United States. He also shares a profession with Durán, as they have dedicated their lives to teaching and writing. He’s been an active scholar, working at several institutions in the United States, especially Wheaton College, in Massachusetts, where he retired as emeritus professor in 1995. He has published five books, a collection of short stories and numerous articles and essays, but he also has a substantial unpublished work, as he has told me in one of our letters: “more than ten thousand unpublished pages that will be donated to the Harvard library upon my death.”10

10 Maybe due to his “low profile” I believe his work deserves more attention and an in-depth study, as he has remained mostly unknown as a writer of this group, both in Mexico and Spain.

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Ruiz admits that his historic circumstances have defined his work, that the bitter experience of exile is the generating core for his work. “Those who had experience the war like me and the refugee camps of France, and the forced exile had to face once again the ghost of the infinite emigration, of the everlasting foreign-feeling, and had to wonder if this wouldn’t be the normal condition of our species” (Ruiz, “La segunda generación” 152). Roberto Ruiz distances himself from his writing partners of the second generation because his work is not understood as a nostalgic hymn or a symbol of the traumatic experience of exile but rather, is characterized by a strong realism and an obvious moral concern portrayed in characters and symbols of marginalized, excluded and misunderstood people. Ruiz’s work offers us a particular vision of the world, and even without making specific spatial or temporal references, he achieves universality as his concerns acquire a symbolic function extrapolated to different experiences and contexts. We can connect Ruiz’s writing style to T.S. Eliot’s idea of the objective correlative described as a way of transmitting to the reader a particular idea or emotion through external factors that cause a specific sensory experience. Ruiz comments on the matter that: “some of my works reflect war and exile, and others don’t. I have tried to leave exile behind as a subject and turn it into a perspective to understand reality. Instead of telling my story seven times, I would rather create a world seen by a marginalized or excluded subject” (Letter, Oct. 15, 2015).11 The published work of Roberto Ruiz, though scarce, is worth reading because his pessimistic style relays a fierce criticism of the injustice and aberrations of wars: any war. His first novel, Plazas sin muros, published in 1960, is an antimilitarist statement that advocates the freedom of men. Its protagonist, Almagro, is an apathetic soldier who

11 “Algunas de mis obras reflejan la guerra y el exilio, y otras no. He procurado dejar atrás el exilio como tema, y convertirlo en prisma o punto de vista a través del cual se perciben otros paisajes. En lugar de contar mi historia siete veces, preferiría crear un mundo, un mundo, desde luego, visto por un sujeto marginado o excluido” (Carta, 15 de oct. de 2015).

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evidences the irrationality of military life. In a letter, Ruiz admits that “The Plazas sin muros or those squares without walls are places of false, illusory freedom and without responsibilities. The soldiers of this novel reject impunity and the horrible inversion of war values, where the murderer, the rapist and the arsonist are considered heroes and the deserter is a criminal. They choose desertion as true liberation, as exit from the ‘plazas’” (Letter, Dec. 3, 2015).12 El ultimo oasis, published in 1964, portrays the hard experience of survival in a refugee camp in France after the Republican exodus of 1939. The main characters of this novel are the most vulnerable groups in armed conflicts: children, women and the elderly confined in isolation, instead of men and soldiers. Ruiz manages to make the refugee camp a reconditioning abject space of existence, reversing the spaces to enable the camp to create its own discourse and, paradoxically, become a source of soothing identity for prisoners who are held there. In the end, one of the main characters feels anguished by being liberated: “despite the fevers, the cold, the pain and the hunger, the third pavilion had been a haven and an oasis. Perhaps the last oasis: now I have to follow the pilgrimage, I have to go back to exile” (178). In Paraíso cerrado, cielo abierto (1977), Ruiz continues to affirm his total opposition to war and reflects on the question of the exilic condition, which evidences an evolution in his work that coincides with a moment of existential concern on a personal level, and even shared with his peers of the second generation. It is an experimental novel, with a clean and realistic style that denounces the alienation of contemporary men in the midst of a possible Third World War. The story takes place on an island, not a random place, showing the confinement of men, the lack of opportunities and the impossibility of escape. 12 “Las plazas sin muros son el recinto de la falsa libertad, de la libertad ilusoria y sin responsabilidades. Los soldados de mi novela rechazan la impunidad y la monstruosa inversión de valores de la guerra, donde el asesino, el violador y el incendiario se consideran héroes y el desertor es un criminal. Ellos escogen la deserción como liberación verdadera, como salida de las plazas . . .” (Carta, 3 de dic. de 2015).

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“Executioners or victims? Wardens or prisoners? All in one, all in the world. The world, like hell, is concentric. You can break the first circle, the second, the third, until you reach a circle that is encircled: you can’t go any further.” (92)13

In this work, men come to an absolute loss of their identity and interiority, producing a deep confrontation between human beings and the universe. Ruiz offers a decadent and pessimistic vision of modernity evidenced by a society without values and trivial, aspirations. The last pages of the novel are enlightening: we find, as in El último oasis, one of the officers or wardens trying to escape while assuming the harsh reality of facing a hopeless future: “What did he get by running away? Where was he going to go? To war? Doesn’t he know that everything is in ruins, that there is nowhere to go, that only here one can live in peace?” (170).14 Throughout his career, Ruiz has remained faithful to his thoughts and themes, managing to convey his message about the fragility of man and his circumstance and the existential nature of the human condition. For this reason, there’s a need to make use of language to testify and intervene on the collective social space. Writing becomes an act of remembrance, and validation. As Ruiz himself told me in one of our letters from 2016: Writing has helped me to recover and rebuild my memory. Also don’t forget what I’ve already told you: that my writings not only deal with war and exile but with many other issues. Could I have been something else and not a writer? Maybe, but not without having falsified my personality and my destiny. I think I was born for this and my canon is the reflection

13 “¿Verdugos o víctimas? ¿Carceleros o encarcelados? Todos unos, todos en el mundo. El mundo, como el infierno, es concéntrico. Se puede quebrantar el primer círculo, el segundo, el tercero, hasta llegar a un círculo que es cerco: de ahí no se pasa” (92). 14 “¿Qué adelantaba con fugarse? ¿A dónde iba? ¿A la guerra? ¿No sabe que todo está en ruinas, que no hay dónde meterse, que sólo aquí se vive en paz?” (170).

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of my existence. Therefore, my work is not limited to my past but also to my present and my problematic future.15

As we have seen, for Manuel Durán and Roberto Ruiz, the acceptance of their exilic circumstance as a condition of their own being has transformed these children into a generation with unique stories that go beyond the socio-historical barrier confronting a fully existential meaning of collective memory. Since these “children” are neither Mexican, nor Spanish, they have been suspended between two worlds —sometimes even three for those who came to the United States. Their roots are up in the air, and have transcended their experience to a universal dimension, making the impossible possible, as real citizens of the world, patriots of the land they live in, whatever that land may be. These “children of the war”, by understanding and accepting their exilic condition, are finally able to understand the meaning of their own existence and turn their alienation into their own identity. To sum up, exile became “real” the moment they accepted it as their own and, luckily for us, they transcribed it into their own works. The Spanish exile children became the hispanomexicanos, a hybrid label that promotes a multiplicity of identities and reflections about the individual and its ambiguous world scenarios. Finally, Manuel Durán uses the metaphor of the train to describe the experience of the Spanish exiles of 1939, and more specifically the “furgón de cola” or the caboose as an allegory for his generation: those children who were left behind, halfway, almost without personal memories, but yet as unique witnesses of the tragedy.

15 “A mí la escritura sí me ha servido para recobrar y reconstruir la memoria. Además no olvide lo que le he dicho anteriormente: que mis escritos no sólo tratan de la guerra y el exilio sino de muchos otros temas. ¿Podría yo haber sido otra cosa y no escritor? No sin haber falseado mi personalidad y mi destino. Creo que nací para esto y que bueno o malo, mi canon es el reflejo de mi existencia. Por ello, mi obra no se limita a mi pasado sino también a mi presente y a mi problemático porvenir” (Carta. 4 de mar. de 2016).

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Let us not forget that at the end of the trains, in the caboose, there used to be a large powerful lantern. In our case that light was made of our hopes, our desires, sometimes also our anger and our uncertainties. But we never gave up, and every little victory of ours was a way of saying no, that we would never give up. And now, when the train has already reached the last station, this light is in your hands, your minds, your hearts. You, those who study and appreciate what we have done, please do not let the light fade. (89)16

Works Cited Colina, José de la. Correo Fantasma, 14 Oct. 2014, . Durán, Manuel. El viento del sol. Bloomington: Palibrio, 2011. — “El furgón de cola.” El exilio republicano de 1939 y la segunda generación. Sevilla: Renacimiento, 2011, pp. 81-89. — “Yale Professor Emeritus who Fled Dictators to Be Honored with Major Award.” New Haven Register 7 June 2015, . Accessed 4 May 2020. Interview. Halbwachs, Maurice. The Collective Memory. New York: Harper and Row, 1980. Mateo Gambarte, Eduardo. Los niños de la guerra. Literatura del exilio español en México. Barcelona: Pagès Editors, 2002. Marra López, José Ramón. “Entrevista con Manuel Durán.” Ínsula 252 (1967), p.6. 16 “No olvidemos que al final de los trenes, en el furgón de cola, solía haber un gran farol de potente luz. En nuestro caso esa luz estaba hecha de nuestras esperanzas, nuestros deseos, a veces también de nuestra rabia y nuestras incertidumbres. Pero nunca nos dimos por vencidos, y cada pequeña victoria nuestra era una forma de afirmar que no, que nunca nos daríamos por vencidos. Y ahora, cuando el tren ha llegado ya a la última estación, esta luz está en vuestras manos, vuestras mentes, vuestros corazones. Vosotros, que estudiáis y apreciáis lo que hemos hecho, no dejaréis que la luz se apague” (89).

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Naharro-Calderón, José María (coord.). El exilio de las Españas en las Américas: “¿A dónde fue la canción?” Barcelona: Anthropos, 1991. Parés, Nuria. Cantollano. Ciudad de México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1959. Pascual Buxó, José. “La poesía desarraigada.” Prólogo. La aventura del miedo, César Rodríguez Chicharro, Maracaibo: Universidad del Zulia, 1962. Rius, Luis. “Los españoles en México: historia de una doble personalidad.” El Heraldo Cultural, 17 Feb. 1967, p.6. Rivera, Susana. “Los motivos del desterrado en la poesía de José Pascual Buxó y Manuel Durán.” La Palabra y el Hombre 109, 1999, pp.135-143. — Última voz del exilio: la generación poética hispano-mexicana. New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press, 1989. Ruiz, Roberto. El ultimo oasis. Ciudad de México: Joaquín Mortiz, 1964. — Paraíso cerrado, cielo abierto. Ciudad de México: Joaquín Mortiz, 1977. — Plaza sin muros. Ciudad de México: Ediciones de Andrea, 1960. — “La segunda generación de escritores exiliados en México.” El exilio de las Españas de 1939 en las Américas: ¿A dónde fue la canción?, coordinated by J. M. Naharro-Calderón, Barcelona: Anthropos, 1991, pp. 149-154. — “Testimonio del exilio.” El exilio literario español de 1939, edited by Manuel Aznar Soler, San Cugat del Vallès: GEXEL, 1998, pp. 669-772. Townsend, Peter. El grito de los niños. Madrid: Ultramar, 1980.

Personal correspondence Ruiz, Roberto. Letter to author. 15 Oct. 2015. — Letter to author. 3 Dec. 2015. — Letter to author. 4 Mar. 2016.

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From Max Aub to El Mazucu: The Spanish Exile and its Legacy Rachel Linville The College at Rockport

Literature, film, university classes, academic studies, conferences and oral histories shared with younger generations have all served to preserve the Spanish exile and its legacy. The works of one writer, Max Aub, and one place, El Mazucu, are two unique places of memory (Nora), external aids that help keep alive the collective memory of a group, in this case, the memory of the Spanish Civil War and the exile it caused. Many writers were forced to flee Spain, but Aub stands out for several reasons. His writings question the importance we place on borders and legal papers and facilitate critical thinking at a time when immigration and border walls have become issues exploited to rally political support. Furthermore, he is an example of an exiled Spanish writer whose works communicate the diversity of the Spanish exile through the topics covered and the situations portrayed as well as

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through the numerous genres Aub used and the points of view his works captured. His life story is also a reminder of the countless ways Spaniards could experience the phenomenon of exile. One major figure in the study and preservation of the Spanish exile, including the works of Aub, is José María Naharro-Calderón.1 He warns against the search and consequent nostalgia for exile or the prolonged fixation regarding the historical limits of the cultural problem of exile (Entre el exilio 33). He situates the cultural petrification of exile in the 1950s, when it became the object of attention and publication in Spain, and Francisco Franco’s regime began to turn a blind eye to the penetration of these texts. Exiled writers began to perceive and debate the need to publish in Spain through channels that did not support the regime, but they also questioned if this would bring them closer or, ironically, separate them further (34). Some, like Paulino Masip, dreamed of a return filled with brotherly love and solidarity and that the moral victory of emigration would instill a nostalgia of freedom in Spaniards living in “the interior” (34). For other writers, however, the present becomes a loss, a dream of a glorious return home that will never occur (36). Naharro proposes that we should not attempt to understand the Spanish exile in its totality but consider how we should treat it within contemporary cultural relations (33). In an attempt to capture the diversity of experiences displaced Spaniards faced, he refers to the exile of “las Españas”. He also coins terms, such as “infra-exiled,” to discuss these experiences. As Naharro points out,

1

In addition to the numerous articles and book chapters he has dedicated to Aub, Naharro also wrote the introduction and critical edition of Campo francés for Aub’s Complete Works, the epilogue of the Spanish version of Manuscrito cuervo, the critical notes for the French version of this text and translated El cementerio de Djelfa into French. Naharro’s work on Max Aub, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Antonio Machado and several other exiled writers situates him in a longstanding tradition of professors at the University of Maryland who have focused their careers on the Spanish exile, like Graciela Palau-Nemes, or who have been major representatives of this exile, most notably Juan Ramón Jiménez himself.

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Cuando el “infra-exiliado” intenta volver, se rompe la entropía, y aquél se encuentra incapacitado para hacerlo al presente del interior, como el Max Aub de La gallina ciega. El uno del memorialista se encuentra con el dolor de saberse otro, de no poder separarse de la piel de ese otro que le reprocha y le señala sus irremediables diferencias adquiridas en la emigración: “Me ha dolido tanto, que ni un solo día me he sentido suficientemente alejado de las piedras, del cielo o las personas para juzgarlos con buen humor”. Es la fase que llamaría del “exilio en el exilio” o de “infra-exilio”, allí donde la espiral del ostracismo condena a los exiliados a la derrota del olvido. (38)

Although there were shared experiences such as the dehumanizing process of crossing the French border or the concentration camps, each Spaniard brought their own unique circumstances that shaped how they would experience them. It is hard to imagine anyone else with as unique a background as Max Aub, one that would repeatedly make him a suspicious Other. Aub refers to his double, triple, maybe even quadruple otherness in his Diarios: ¡Qué daño no me ha hecho, en nuestro mundo cerrado, el no ser de ninguna parte! El llamarme como me llamo, con nombre y apellido que lo mismo pueden ser de un país que de otro . . . En estas horas de nacionalismo cerrado el haber nacido en París, y ser español, tener padre español nacido en Alemania, madre parisina, pero de origen también alemana, pero de apellido eslavo, y hablar con ese acento francés que desgarra mi castellano, ¡que daño no me ha hecho! El agnosticismo de mis padres —librepensadores— en un país católico como España, o su prosapia judía, en un país antisemita como Francia, ¡qué disgustos, qué humillaciones no me ha acarreado! (qtd. in Manuscrito Cuervo in Naharro-Calderón 188)

In 1914, when Aub was eleven, his family fled from France to Valencia due to his father’s nationality and lost all their possessions. So how is it that he would be arrested in France in 1940 due to a text written by the Francoist Embassy to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs that denounced him as a communist of “dangerous activities” and a Jew, who had been nationalized by the “Red Government”?

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Between 1914 and 1940 there would be several more border crossings and a series of events that would influence Aub’s life. Aub became a member of the Socialist party, Partido Socialista Obrero Espanol, in 1929. Although he joined the Alianza de Intelectuales Antifascistas para la Defensa de la Cultura, and in Paris he participated in the preparations of the Second Congress of Antifascist Writers, both of which were dominated by the Communis, he was never a member of the PCE, Partido Comunista de España. After working as Spain’s cultural attaché in France, Aub returned to Spain in 1938 to film Sierra de Teruel with André Malraux. In “Conversación post mortem,” Aub expresses his surprise at Malraux’s decision to work with him: “nadie supo quién era hasta que Malraux se decidió —a mi gran sorpresa— a llevarme con él para hacer Sierra de Teruel. Empezaron a tenerme por comunista (menos los comunistas, por supuesto)” (qtd. 195). Even though Aub indicated at times his desire to see communist ideals succeed, his criticism of totalitarianism in Stalin’s USSR, the pact of non-aggression between the Nazis and the Soviets, as well as certain aspects of communist ideology, he would ultimately be treated with intolerance by communists. He later maintained a close friendship with PCE members with ties to Juan Negrín’s SERE (Servicio de Evacuación de los Refugiados Españoles), but these relationships did not help him emigrate from France to Latin America after the Spanish Civil War. Thanks to Naharro’s archival research, we know that it was someone linked to these emigration services and not the local government that impeded Aub’s emigration. In a 1970 prologue to “El laberinto mágico”, Aub writes: “Te borraron de la lista —me dijo uno. Algunos supieron quien lo hizo: nunca quisieron decirme su nombre. A estas alturas tanto me da” (qtd. 195). Immediately after his arrest in April of 1940 and subsequent internment in Le Vernet, a concentration camp used by the French Third Republic government to house, among others, foreigners considered suspicious or dangerous, Aub sought the help of important politicians and intellectuals, including the former minister Julián Zugazagoitia and the French writer Jules Romains. In his correspondence with Aub, Romains highlights the arbitrary and xenophobic nature of the detentions: For the vast majority of those detained in the camps,

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there was not a shred of evidence against them, and to free themselves they had to prove their innocence, a system that recalls the guarantees (or avales) of the Francoist repression as Romains points out (203). Aub was released from Vernet in November of 1940 only to be rearrested in Nice, where he spent fifteen days in the city jail in June of 1941 despite having a letter of safe-passage (Naharro “Max Aub” 105). He would be arrested again on August 26, 1941, interned a second time in Vernet in September and subsequently deported to Djelfa, a punishment camp in Algeria. Even a decade later and as far away as Mexico, the false accusation that he was a communist continued to influence his life. In his “Carta al presidente Vicente Auriol” from 1951 in the collection Hablo como hombre, Aub protests the denial of an entry visa to visit his parents in France. He reaffirms his identity as a socialist and rejects the idea of having to become an anticommunist or “comecomunista” just to be forgiven for a false accusation (200-01). It was not until 1957 that Aub’s police file was finally exonerated (104). Considering Aub’s life experiences, it is not surprising that the topic of the arbitrariness of accusations, laws, frontiers and one’s own identity receives attention repeatedly in his works. In his “Carta al presidente Vicente Auriol,” Aub writes: Ya sé que estoy fichado, y que esto es lo que cuenta, lo que vale. Que lo que diga la ficha sea verdad o no, [eso no importa, ni] entra en juego. Es decir, que yo, mi persona, lo que pienso, lo que siento, no es la verdad. La verdad es lo que está escrito. [. . .] Yo, Max Aub, no existo: el que vive es el peligroso comunista que un soplón denunció un día, supongo que por justificar su sueldo. (qtd. in Naharro, “Max Aub” 106)

It is surprising that someone so affected by papers —be they the papers Aub sought to defend himself and free himself from the concentration camps or the papers on which the initial false accusation was made or any other papers— is able to discuss this topic with such humor. In Manuscrito cuervo, Aub indicates that the text was written by a crow, Jacobo, which actually was a mascot in one of the Vernet barracks. The “bird” analyzes the arbitrary and absurd nature of hu-

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mans, and ultimately points out that humans are inferior to crows. In one part called “De los papeles,” the crow explains that: Los hombres tienen en mucho poseer el mayor número de papeles donde se asegure —¡oh infantilismo! ¡oh cortedad del intelecto!— que ellos son ellos y no su vecino. Suelen decir, frases sacramentales que se oyen en todo momento: “¡Sí, yo tengo todos mis papeles!” “¡Sí, todos mis papeles están en regla!” Lo sorprendente es que no sirven para nada. [. . .] Lo cierto es que no se atreven a vivir sin ellos y son capaces de dar cualquier cosa por conseguirlos; algunos he visto encerrados por intentar tenerlos rápidamente, otros por carecer de ellos, consecuencia de la absurda, monstruosa importancia que dan los hombres a lo impreso. (98-99)

Jacobo, the crow, goes on to discuss another type of papers, bank papers, which humans prefer: “Llevado por mi afán de conocer, y aun por la curiosidad, comí un billete de los tal; puedo asegurar que no difieren de los demás papeles” (99). In this text, we also find the affirmation that: “No cuenta la vida, sino lo escrito” (100), an idea that Aub would latter echo as seen in the quote above from his letter to the French president. At the end of this piece, Jacobo concludes: “Son capaces de matar con tal de conseguir unos papeles, aunque sean falsos. Supongo que esta absurda costumbre contribuye en mucho al triste estado actual del hombre” (100-02). It is hard to think of a truer statement at a time when immigrants die trying to cross land and water borders in the most dire of situations because they do not have “papers.” If they survive that ordeal, many still end up in concentration camps. If we should consider how to treat the topic of exile and the works of exiled writers within contemporary cultural relations, as Naharro proposes, then perhaps we should also take heed —particularly now as nationalism is on the rise again— of Aub’s warnings about the arbitrary nature of frontiers. In another section of Manuscrito cuervo called “De la muda y de las fronteras,” Jacobo writes: “Sépase que frontera es algo muy importante, que no existe y que, sin embargo, los hombres defienden a pluma y pico como si fuese real. Estos seres se pasan la vida matán-

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dose los unos a los otros o reuniéndose alrededor de una mesa, sin lograr entenderse, como es natural, para rectificar estas líneas inexistentes” (104). To address the arbitrary codes that govern reality, Aub experimented with many genres, including novels, film scripts, diaries, theater, and poetry. These genres as well as the multiplicity of versions and points of view in Aub’s works attest to his attempt to respond to the codes and ways that are systematically arbitrary not only within the concentration camps, but also in the world outside of the camps (Naharro, “Max Aub” 99-100). In some stories initially fleshed out during his time in Vernet, Aub’s style of writing suggests a moment of composition that is coetaneous to a presence in the camps. His texts read like a translation that appears true and testimonial, more like a chronicle, and not a text that was latter altered. In “Historia de Vidal,” the use of the present tense and the reference to a fellow inmate —“No sé si te acuerdas de él”— point to a narration made from within the camps and an internal memory (qtd. in Naharro, “Max Aub” 101). Neither the voice nor the space evoked by this narration escape the confines of the camp. In the introduction to Diario de Djelfa, Aub defends the use of poetry, particularly romance, as a pure form that divests from the presence of the witness: “Cuando, en el campo, intenté escribir lo más sencillamente posible lo que acontecía, en verso salió. El verso es lo más desnudo” (qtd. in “Max Aub” 106). In the film script Campo francés, he would try to document what he lived and suppress the voice of a narrator by projecting newspaper titles and photographs as well as contemporary films. However, Aub’s stories dealing with the concentration camps begin to change with respect to the narrative voices and the spatial and temporal distance suggested by their discourse. These changes differentiate these stories from earlier works in which Aub sought to achieve a testimonial style devoid of any distance (103). The latter narratives use the past tense and points of view that suggest an external memory that is after the time in the camps. Despite the variation of genres and the varying distance evoked by the narrative voices, many of these texts, as well as Aub’s works that do

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not strictly address the theme of the camps, like his letter to the French president, have one element in common. They point to the arbitrary nature of daily life both inside as well as outside of the camps. Aub adopts discursive strategies that reveal that our day to day living —that he thought was controlled by codes that were universal, objective and trustable— is governed by rules that are as arbitrary as the ones that governed life in the camps (104). In both Enero sin nombre and Campo francés, Aub portrays the arbitrary nature of the detentions. Several of the prisoners in Enero sin nombre start up a conversation by asking each other why they are there, which points to the accidental or arbitrary nature of their detention. The responses often address the characters’ ignorance of any possible reason or hope to be released as soon as the “evident” judicial error is righted, using the systematic uniformness of the law to correct the arbitrariness of the detentions. These examples clearly relate back to Aub’s personal life, his initial arrest due to the false accusation, as well as the subsequent arrests despite having a letter of safe passage or being released from Vernet, which would suggest that he had been sufficiently exonerated. A narration Naharro discovered in the Archivo Fundación Max Aub Segorbe is very revealing with respect to Aub’s perspective on the arbitrary nature of his detentions. It depicts a gendarme (or French police trooper) doing the habitual interrogation: Visita del Gendarme “Vengo a hacer un informe.” “¿Es por el salvoconducto?” “Sí.” “¿Ha visto Ud. mi expediente?” “Sí.” “¿Entonces?” “Por eso . . .” “Mi padre se llama Federico. Mi madre . . . ¿Por qué llenar inútilmente papeles?” “¿Qué quiere Ud? Es la costumbre. Aquí basta que haga 50 años que se le condenara a una multa para que no se borre. Aunque haya habido cien indultos. A Ud. lo denunciaron por hombre peligroso, aunque luego

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se demostrara que no, pues ahí sigue la denuncia.” (qtd. in Naharro, “Max Aub” 105)2

It did not matter how many times Aub attempted to clear his name, to seek freedom from the camps, the 1940 accusation would continue to follow him until he was exonerated in 1957. Naharro has preserved the Spanish exile not only through his studies and teachings, but also through the academic engagements he organizes. Every August he organizes a conference in Llanes, Spain. The title and topic vary year to year, but in general, it address the complex historical and present day phenomena of borderlands, diasporas, displacements, and exiles. Presenters have included historians, literary and film critics, musicians, as well as Spanish guerrilla fighters living in Spain and France and Spaniards exiled to the USSR as children. Thus, for some of the presenters and participants, the conference offers them a reason to return, to return and to remember. Because this conference is an academic initiative on Diasporas Studies, students can earn university recognition for participating. For the younger generation, this punto de encuentro becomes a way of learning, of acquiring a historical memory of the Spanish Civil War and the Spanish exile.3 During the conference, participants visit El Mazucu, which was the site of a battle in Eastern Asturias in September of 1937. The

2 “Visit of the Trooper. I came to draw a report./Is this for the permit?/Yes/Have you seen my file?/Yes/So …/Precisely …/ My father’s name is Frederick. My mother’s ... Why do you fill out worthless papers? What do you want? It’s customary. Here, a fifty year old fine is never voided. Even if there were one hundred pardons, you were signaled as a dangerous individual, and even if later it is proven otherwise, the allegation would stand.” 3 Maurice Halbwachs’ study of memory approaches this concept as a collective phenomenon because even if an individual is alone when he or she has a particular experience, one is always imbedded in a social structure. In a group that shares a collective memory, there can be individuals who have an autobiographical memory of an event because they lived it as well as those who did not live it, but acquired a historical memory by hearing oral histories, reading texts, viewing films or photographs, etc.

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pass of El Mazucu was an area that forces loyal the Second Spanish Republic defended to prevent the fall of Asturias, which had become isolated from Republican-held areas in the South and East of Spain. This visits represent the flip side of exile, the return. Not a flip side as in an opposite, but perhaps as the refrain la otra cara de la moneda suggests, two parts of a whole. When I participated in the 2006 and 2009 conferences, I had the opportunity to visit El Mazucu. After a steep, mountainous climb, we came to an area with fern-covered trenches and a rudimentary fortification built by Republican militiamen. To engage with the terrain and hear the oral histories shared by José María Naharro-Calderón, Juan Álvarez, and Felipe Matarranz, who fought in that battle and later joined the guerrilla resistance, and others, created a sensation of being able to touch and live history, which points to El Mazucu’s utility as a place of memory. It is a material place that people can visit and it functions, as it did during the visits I participated in, as a way to transmit an oral history to newcomers, to a group that shares a collective memory of the Spanish Civil War and the Spanish exile, particularly to younger group members who do not have an autobiographical memory of this period in Spanish history. Finally, it is symbolic of the efforts made by militiamen, who had little to no military training, to defend the Second Spanish Republic. From our impressive mountainous viewpoint, we were able to stand in the place where the militiamen were fired on and bombarded from almost every direction. From the sea, five kilometers to the north, the Almirante Cervera’s six-inch guns bombarded them. The German Condor Legion bombed them from the air, the first time a military target was carpet-bombed.4 On September 6, the first day of the battle, the Republican forces, many of whom were young milicianos,

4

On the road leading up to the pass, there stood until recently a monument commemorating the German participation in this battle. The construction of this monument, the graffiti enacted upon it, and its recent removal all symbolize the memory battles that have transpired during the dictatorship and the democratic era.

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stopped an advance from the south despite being outnumbered about 7-to-1. Matarranz described how they defended themselves with not much other than shotguns and rifles. They filled jars with dynamite, screws and other scrap metals and threw them towards the advancing rebel army. These rudimentary bombs made impressive explosions, but their reach was far too short to do real damage. Nevertheless, it helped to resist the first twenty-four hours and on September 7 the Republican commander, Higinio Carrocera, arrived with three battalions and twenty-four heavy machine guns and the fronts stabilized. The Republican forces, with no aerial support and little artillery compared to General Solchaga’s fifteen artillery batteries, were eventually defeated, leading to the subsequent fall of Gijón on October 21, the last Republican stronghold in Northern Spain. While writing my dissertation on the literary and cinematic representations of the Spanish guerrilla resistance to Franco’s dictatorship, I interviewed several guerrilla fighters. One was Felipe Matarranz and another José Antonio Alonso Alcalde “Comandante Robert,” who returned several times to Spain to participate in the conferences held in Llanes.5 To interview Alonso, I went to Castres, France, where he lived with his French wife and children until his death in 2015. One major appreciation I gained from interviewing Alonso was the incredible difference between how guerrilla resisters were treated in France and Spain. Spaniards, who fought in the French resistance to the Nazis, and their French comrades are remembered, revered, and honored frequently in ceremonies in France as liberators. In Spain, there are

5

After fighting in the Spanish Civil War and crossing the French border, Alonso was interned in the concentration camp of Sept Fonds. Later, he was one of the leaders in the liberation of Foix, a significant victory in the resistance against the Nazis. Finally, during the invasion of the Arán Valley (1944), he was in command of a group of guerrillas that returned to Spain to oppose Franco. This Spanish Communist Party planned invasion in which about 6,000-7,000 guerrillas participated, failed in its attempt to create a stronghold in Spain that could be held through the winter months with the ultimate purpose of attracting the support of western democracies, but succeeded in adding many fighters to the ranks of guerrilla organizations that already existed in Spain.

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organizations, including the Gavilla Verde, that organize conferences and ceremonies to honor the guerrilla resistance (such as the one in Santa Cruz de Moya), but they are extremely small scale and do not receive attention in regional news coverage and much less national media. Although the exposition of motives for what would become the Law of Historical Memory (2007) referred to the antifrancoist guerrillas as “combatants,” their rehabilitation fell into oblivion. None of the articles of this law addressed the need to expunge the Francoist police files that refer to them as “malhechores” and “bandoleros”. The guerrillas have, in large part, been forgotten, and the official memory that exists is clearly one that defames them. Laws and police files, however, are not the only artifacts that point to the memory of the guerillas. Literature and film also portray how different groups remember them and how the diverse collective memories have evolved from 1936 to today. They also tell the story of exile and the difficulties writers and directors faced. Many of these works would face delays. After the fall of Barcelona, Aub crossed into France with the Sierra de Teruel film crew and his diplomatic passport (Aub, Manuscrito Cuervo, Naharro-Calderón 202). He did not go immediately into the camps (like many Spaniards), but was able to finish the film with Malraux. Nevertheless, Sierra de Teruel was not distributed until 1945, after the end of World War II. Aub and many other exiled Spaniards would find in Mexico an adoptive home. From there, Luisa Carnés published Juan Caballero (1956) and Ramón J. Sender Mosén Millán (1953), a novel better known by the title it would bear from 1960 on: Réquiem por un campesino español. It is not surprising that, in general, the works published or produced in exile offer a favorable representation of the guerrillas (and their precursors the huidos —those who fled to the mountains to avoid Francoist reprisals). In the case of Sierra de Teruel, the film responds to the Republican government’s desire to attract international support at a moment when the outcome of the Spanish Civil War was still undecided. Aub’s script, which adapts Malraux’s novel L’espoir (1937), tells the story of a group of Republican aviators and resistance fighters, who collaborate to blow up a bridge in Teruel, and portrays the procession of townspeople who rescue the injured Republican aviators. We should not

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forget that this film would not be the first time that Aub promoted the Republican cause. As Subcomissioner for the Universal Exposition Pavillion in Paris, Aub asked Picasso to create a painting, which would later be known as Guernica. At about the same time that these works appeared in France and Mexico, two other novels were published by the American Ernest Hemingway and the Hungarian Brit Emeric Pressburger. Their respective works, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) and Killing a Mouse on Sunday (1961), depict the guerilla resistance during and after the Spanish Civil War less favorably, but also portray the political motivation of the resistors, which distances these texts from all forms of Francoist memory —laws, decrees, police files as well as works of fiction— that attempted to discredit the guerrilla resistance by depoliticizing it. Hemingway’s fascination with Spain is clear starting with his 1926 novel The Sun also Rises. After his initial intrigue with the running of the bulls, he would return to Spain as a journalist, writing at least thirty dispatches on the Spanish Civil War from Republican-held territory between 1937-1938. However, after Franco’s victory, Hemingway continued to visit Spain. These subsequent border crossings would be politicized by addicts of the regime like Rafael Calvo Serer. In his 1962 book, Calvo Serer suggests that Hemingway held a favorable opinion of the 1936 uprising by stating: “La presencia reiterada de Hemingway en España durante estos años de paz puede ser un indicio de cuál fué su actitud” (my emphasis, 18). The euphemism with which he refers to the era of the dictatorship responds to the desire to portray Franco as a leader who ensures peace and prosperity, a rhetorical strategy used to justify Franco remaining in power. In concluding, it is clear that politicized border crossings, the challenges of exile, the difficulty or impossibility of returning home for some, and the ability of others to return and keep memory alive through conferences are all experiences related to “líneas inexistentes” as Max Aub called frontiers in Manuscrito cuervo. Imaginary lines that cause real wars, real exile, and real pain. The questions raised by Aub in his works, which exemplify the diversity of the exile of “las Españas”, regarding the arbitrariness of these lines as well as our ob-

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session with papers, facilitate critical thinking when we engage with contemporary cultural relations. His works, as well as El Mazucu, serve as unique places of memory, external supports that protect the collective memory of the Spanish Civil War and the exile it caused.

Works Cited Aub, Max. El laberinto mágico III: Campo francés. Critical edition, introduction and notes by José María Naharro-Calderón. Valencia: Biblioteca Valenciana, 2008. — Enero sin nombre: los relatos completos del Laberinto Mágico. Barcelona: Alba, 1997. — Manuscrit corbeau. Trans. Marrast, Robert. Suivi de Le cimetière de Djelfa. Trans. Naharro-Calderón, José María. Barcelona: Mare Nostrum, 1998. — Manuscrito cuervo. Critical edition by José Antonio Pérez Bowie and Epilogue by José María Naharro-Calderón. Segorbe / Alcalá de Henares: Fundación Max Aub / Universidad de Alcalá de Henares, 1999. Calvo Serer, Rafael. La literatura universal sobre la guerra de España. Madrid: Ateneo, 1962. Carnés, Luisa. Juan Caballero. Ciudad de México: Novelas Atlante, 1956. Espoir (Sierra de Teruel). Directed by André Malraux, As Films S.A.Interpeninsular Films S.S., 1945. Halbwachs, Maurice. Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, [1925]1952. — La mémoire collective. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1950. Hemingway, Ernest. For Whom the Bell Tolls. New York: Scribner, 1940. Malraux, André. L’espoir. Paris: Gallimard, 2017. Naharro-Calderón, José María. Entre alambradas y exilios. Sangrías de “las Españas” y terapias de Vichy. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2017. — Entre el exilio y el interior: el “entresiglo” y Juan Ramón Jiménez. Barcelona: Anthropos, 1994.

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— “Max Aub y los ‘universos concentracionarios’.” Homenaje a Max Aub, edited by James Valender and Gabriel Rojo. Ciudad de México: El Colegio de México, 2005, pp. 99-125. Nora, Pierre. Les lieux de mémoire. 3 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1984-1992. Pressburger, Emeric. Killing a Mouse on Sunday. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961. R. O. “Solicitan a la embajada alemana la retirada de los monumentos de la Legión Cóndor.” El Comercio, 30 Oct. 2015, https://www. elcomercio.es/asturias/oriente/201510/30/solicitan-embajada-alemana-retirada-20151030001408-v.html. Sender, Ramón J. Mosén Millán. Ciudad de México: Editorial Intercontinental, 1953.

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Two Visions of the United States in the Fiction of Spanish Exiles in the 1940s: Manuel de la Sota and Pedro Salinas Ricardo F. Vivancos-Pérez George Mason University

Introduction This essay examines two novels that have not received much attention until very recently, and that are eccentric exile narratives in different ways. Yanqui hirsutus (published in Buenos Aires in 1949 but finished in May 1946 in New York City) was written by Manuel de la Sota —a multitalented Basque lawyer, journalist and cultural worker. His father, Ramón de la Sota (1857-1936) was the owner of a shipping company, a prominent Basque nationalist, and a relevant member of the Basque bourgeoise before the war. Following his father’s steps, De la Sota became a prominent member of the Basque Nationalist Party and moved to New York City in 1938 as part of the Basque Govern-

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ment Delegation to the city, which he led from 1939 to 1942. He had obvious literary inclinations but was never known as a literary author. Yanqui hirsutus was not the object of attention when released, nor was it included in the main lists of literary works by exiles (GonzálezAllende). The unfinished novel El valor de la vida was written between the fall of 1948 and the summer of 1949 by Pedro Salinas —a criticallyacclaimed poet, critic and educator who, in the last four years of his life as an exile in the USA, decided to return to writing fiction more than twenty years after the publication of his short story collection Víspera del gozo in 1926. The unpublished manuscript of El valor de la vida, probably the longest literary piece that he ever attempted to write, is part of the personal papers that Salinas left after his untimely death on December 4, 1951, now held at the Houghton Library at Harvard University. It has eleven chapters —the complete Part One of the novel, according to the drafts of the table of contents. Salinas’s daughter, Solita Salinas, and her husband, Juan Marichal, controlled his estate. They devoted much of their lives to disseminating knowledge about his life and works, as well as to cataloging, preserving and publishing some of his manuscripts over the years, but not all. El valor de la vida was not part of his Obras completas, until Bou’s edition in 2007 and Paulino’s (2009).1 Despite an alarming, but not surprising, lack of attention to Manuel de la Sota’s novel, and the fact that Salinas’s unpublished novel did not reach readers until sixty years after it was conceived, both are worth studying in the context of a cultural and literary history of Spanish exiles’ fictional narratives in the USA. Yanqui hirsutus and El valor de la vida, together with Salinas’s novella La bomba increíble —I am not studying this piece here because it has received much

1

In the 2010s, Montserrat Escartín Gual edited a total of 143 poems (Poesía inédita), and Natalia Vara Ferrero two essays and two short fiction pieces (Defensa del estudiante y la Universidad) and the two satirical short fiction pieces “A la sombra del paraguas en flor” and “Los cuatro grandes mayúsculos y la doncella Tibérica” (Dos prosas inéditas).

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more critical attention and because of lack of space— are probably the earliest examples of fiction by the Spanish Republican exiled writers in North America that focus on the United States as the place of destination; that is, that focus on American culture and society as the main center of a narrative that is located elsewhere, or that focus on the United States as the territory including the particular, lived spaces of the narrative as well as the locations or settings or spaces where the fictional story takes place.2 My ongoing research about the different generations and waves of Spanish intellectuals that have resided in the United States since 1936 shows that, after these two early examples of a USA-focused fictional narrative in the 1940s, written by two authors that belong to the first generation of exiles that arrived in the USA during or immediately after the Spanish war —those who were consolidated professionals before going into exile— there are a few more cases of novels whose center is the USA in the next two decades, six in the 1970s, six in the 1980s, and seven in the 1990s, with much higher numbers in the 2000s and later. In what follows, I focus on Yanqui hirsutus and El valor de la vida examining how USA national identity and culture are continually approached with ambivalence, highlighting a tension between recognizing the resources, opportunities and freedom that the USA offers, and advancing a critique of the materialistic and unethical dimensions of capitalism with various degrees of irony and satire. The experiments in style, narrative structure and technique that these novels present, as well as the mixed feelings towards USA culture that they include, are recurrent in fictional and nonfictional narratives by those exiles and immigrants.

2

I follow John Agnew’s most common definition of the use of the terms place and space: “In the simplest sense place refers to either a location somewhere or to the occupation of that location. The first sense is of having an address and the second is about living at that address. Sometimes this distinction is pushed further to separate the physical place from the phenomenal space in which the place is located. Thus, place becomes a particular or lived space. Location then refers to the fact that places must be located somewhere. Place is specific and location (or space) is general” (Agnew 318).

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De la Sota’s Yanqui Hirsutus De la Sota finished Yanqui Hirsutus in May 1946 in New York City in a crucial year for Basque nationalist exiles and Spanish exiles. When World War II was almost over, Lehendakari José Antonio Aguirre, who was living in exile in New York since 1942, returned to Europe in March of 1945 to meet with other European political leaders to discuss possible ways of ousting Franco and bringing democracy to Spain and the Basque country. In April of the same year, Aguirre also participated, along with Spanish Republican exile leaders, in the meeting leading to the creation of the United Nations in San Francisco. Franco’s regime was not invited. In 1946, Iberian exiles had high hopes about the results of the UN meetings that culminated with the December 12 Resolution of the UN General Assembly which confirmed the exclusion of Franco’s Spain from the UN, condemned his dictatorial regime’s support of Hitler and Mussolini, and denounced their systematic human rights violations. This happened a day after another important resolution that recognized the Nürnberg Tribunal —Affirmation of the Principles of internal Law Recognized by the Charter of the Nürnberg Tribunal (UN General Assembly). In this vibrant sociopolitical climate of excitement and hope, writing Yanqui hirsutus allowed De la Sota to come to terms with his experience of exile of nearly eight years in the USA. Instead of locating the story in New York, he wrote a fictionalized autobiographical account of the year he was preparing his trip to America, from the summer of 1937 to August 1938, staying with his family in a house that faced the lighthouse of Biarritz, on the southwest coast of France. The character-narrator never mentions his own name, but some data during the narrative clearly identifies him with De la Sota himself–being a member of the Basque bourgeoisie, forty years old, and so on. The book starts when the narrator announces his decision to travel to the United States and ends when he is about to disembark in Ellis Island. During that time, he and his travel companion and mentor, Don Babel, learn about the USA by reading books about Ameri-

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can history and identity, philosophy, and literature, and mostly by having interactions with Basque, European and American characters. Don Babel —a retired ship captain— and the narrator become a fictional pair that reminds readers of Don Quijote and Sancho. In one of the episodes, Don Babel is close to losing his mind reading books and trying to come up with a brief definition of American identity. Both characters may also represent two different generations of Basque nationalists. Their trip preparation involves an accumulation of stereotypical information about Americans that gradually convinces both of them of the greatness of American values —mostly freedom, capitalism, and a vision focused on the future— over European traditional beliefs and customs. The episodic structure of the novel combines short chapters or vignettes with chapters that read more as personal essays. There is a repetitive and almost obsessive fixation with discussing USA culture visà-vis Basque and European cultural practices and beliefs. The main perspective is not that of the working-class refugee, but a privileged one, that of the Basque bourgeoisie, showing compassion towards other refugees but not suffering the hardships that most of them went through in France because of the Spanish Civil War. The ludic and humorous tone, the narrative hybridity, and the focus on stereotypes resemble the fiction of British author P. G. Wodehouse, whose works of fiction were very popular at the time. It is a humor based on repeated discussions of national or regional stereotypical traits. During his years as a law student at the University of Cambridge, de la Sota could have been exposed to this way of writing that prioritizes repetition and variation rather than in-depth social commentary. The title of the novel may serve as an example. As González-Allende explains: El protagonista, al igual que el propio Sota, decide escribir un libro sobre los americanos que se titulará precisamente Yanqui hirsutus. Este juego metaliterario que se revela al final de la obra sirve al lector para entender el título de la misma, ya que don Babel, un capitán vasco retirado que acompaña al protagonista en su viaje actuando como su mentor, le aconseja que escriba un libro “hablando mal de los americanos” para

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poder hacer dinero en los Estados Unidos porque, según él, los americanos “son la única gente del mundo que sabe apreciar los insultos”. El término “hirsuto” del título no haría referencia al abundante vello, sino a su acepción de carácter duro y áspero y supondría, por tanto, una crítica del carácter americano. (18)

De la Sota’s main concern with representing the tensions that arise from cultural differences and cultural adaptation also relates Yanqui hirsutus to fictional and nonfictional works written by Spanish immigrants who settled in the USA before 1936. It resembles, for instance, Antonio Heras’s collection of journalistic personal essays De la vida norteamericana: Impresiones frívolas, first published in 1924 in Madrid, and edited as a textbook for Spanish college students in the USA in 1929. Also episodic and autobiographical, although more critical and ironic in tone and content, De la vida norteamericana traces Heras’s trips within the USA since he arrived from Spain in 1919. Heras settled in Los Angeles and was a professor at USC from 1925-1950.3 The dialogic approach to cultural differences in Yanqui hirsutus is also similar to the one in Felipe Alfau’s novel Chromos, published in 1990 but written also in the late 1940s. Alfau emigrated with his family to New York City in 1916 when he was fourteen. He wrote in English. Chromos was his second and last novel and presents the lives of a group of Spanish immigrants in the Spanish Harlem in New York City, using an unnamed narrator, and blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction. Darker and highly satirical, the tone in Chromos is closer to that of Salinas’s El valor de la vida, as we will see later. What differentiates Yanqui hirsutus from all those works is its exploration of the cultural and ideological preparations for the trip to the USA, of the action and movement during the itinerary from Bi-

3

Heras hosted Pedro Salinas when he was teaching at the University of Southern California in the summer of 1939 as Visiting Professor. He and UCLA Professor César Barja, also a Spanish immigrant, showed him around the city and also organized some trips to nearby Missions and other relevant sites. Salinas writes extensively about his stay in Los Angeles in hies letters to his wife and daughter from that summer (Obras completas III 741-67).

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arritz to Paris and then to Le Havre, and of the transatlantic trip to New York City. According to the narrator and Don Babel, one of the main identity traits that Americans and Basques share is that both are centered on the future, while other Europeans are stranded in the past. This emphasis on dynamism, on being proactive, and on the travel itinerary as providing positive transitional moments for reflection and hope is clearly reminiscent of Lehendakari Aguirre’s travel narrative De Guernica a Nueva York pasando por Berlin (1943), written right when Aguirre joined De la Sota in New York City. According to the papers of the Spanish Embassy in the USA that Ambassador Fernando de los Ríos kept after the war, and are held at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, De la Sota received $2,000 from the Spanish Embassy during the Spanish Civil War to sponsor the book The Basque Problem: As Seen by Cardinal Gomà and President Aguirre, written under the pseudonym of Dr de Azpilikoeta and published by The Basque Archives in NYC in 1938, the same year De la Sota settled in New York. As González-Allende argues, Yanqui hirsutus is also part of De la Sota’s propagandistic efforts as member of the Basque Government Delegation in the USA: Aguirre se posicionaba de manera incondicional a favor de los aliados porque consideraba que su lucha por la libertad eventualmente beneficiaría a la causa vasca. Los nacionalistas vascos tenían la esperanza de que Estados Unidos les apoyara junto a las Naciones Unidas para expulsar a Franco del mando de España y poder así reconocer los derechos del pueblo vasco. De esta forma, Yanqui hirsutus se puede entender como una obra cuya intención es reflejar la posición laudatoria oficial del nacionalismo vasco respecto a los Estados Unidos. De hecho, se podría decir que es un producto más de las numerosas labores propagandísticas que Sota realizaba en Nueva York como miembro de la Delegación del Gobierno Vasco. (26)

The lack of critical attention to this novel is not surprising. It may have circulated, as Gonzalez-Allende tells us, mainly as a propaganda text, rather than for its literary value. Additionally, the novel’s enthusiastic message about the future of Basque-American relations, the Basque country and Spain became obsolete from the time it was writ-

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ten to the time of its publication in 1949. By the end of 1947, it was clear that the December 1946 UN resolution was not going to change anything regarding Spain. The USA opposed a new resolution against Franco’s fascist rule in November 1947, while his regime reached a commercial and financial agreement with France, and the border between the two countries was reopened. From today’s perspective, Yanqui hirsutus is in many ways a relevant novel. Its emphasis on the trip preparation resembles more recent immigration fiction in which acculturation and cultural adaptation starts at the time the character decides on the place of destination. Concha Alborg’s novel Una noche en casa (1995) is a good example. Loosely autobiographical, the novel explores the narrator’s memories about her life in Spain before emigrating with her family to the United States in the early 1960s. I will discuss later how Pedro Salinas also includes learning about the culture of destination as an important stage of development for Gloria Jáuregui, the character who becomes a refugee in the United States in El valor de la vida. There is also an inherent contradiction in Yanqui hirsutus that is worth studying from our post-civil rights movements’ worldview —the novel’s positive view of cultural differences despite its monolithic and stereotypical view of national identities. This view can be seen in other novels written by exiles in the 1960s, such as Segundo Serrano Poncela’s Habitación para hombre solo (1963), set in New York City, Arturo Serrano Plaja’s La cacatúa atmosférica (1977), set in California, and mostly in Ramón Sender’s La tesis de Nancy (1962) and its sequels. Yanqui hirsutus precedes and competes with Sender’s obsessive proliferation of stereotypes, jokes, and episodic anecdotes in his Nancy series that, as I will discuss later, also have similarities with Salinas’s El valor de la vida.

Pedro Salinas’s El valor de la vida Why did Pedro Salinas, a celebrated poet and also an emerging playwright in the circles of Spanish Republican exiles in the United States and Latin America, decide to write short stories, a novella, and a novel

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in the fall of 1948? A series of events and circumstances made 1948 a relevant year in Salinas’s life and may illustrate his sudden return to writing fiction. In the fall of 1946, Salinas came back to Johns Hopkins University after a three-year leave at the University of Puerto Rico, where he had experienced the most productive years of his life due to his reduced teaching load, his release from administrative service, and his affinity to the language, culture and the people in the island. For him personally, returning to Baltimore was not easy. Both his and his wife’s health started to deteriorate, and he continually complained about financial constraints. We see examples of this in his unpublished letters to his daughter Solita Salinas from 1945 to 1947. In March 1947, the boiler in the heating system of his house broke, and his daughter had to send him money to help pay for a new one after reading his father’s complaints: “Estas miserias y estrecheces, a mi edad, me deprimen mucho” (Correpondence, Mar. 5, 1947). To alleviate his financial situation, in addition to his obligations as full professor at Johns Hopkins he taught two courses at Bryn Mawr College during the academic year of 1948-1949, travelling twice a week to Philadelphia. His concerns were partially relieved by a raise that he obtained by renegotiating his contract in December 1948, after a tempting job offer from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Two letters to University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor Lloyd August Kasten from November 22 and December 13, 1948 explain the situation. In the latter, Salinas explains how Johns Hopkins University President Isaiah Bowman matched the offer: Tuve una larga entrevista con el Dr. Bowman, en la cual le oí expresarse en términos sumamente lisonjeros para mi persona y mi labor. Me requirió para que por mi parte hiciese un esfuerzo por seguir en la universidad; y la Administration (sic) por su parte haría otro, para encontrar solución al problema. Así ha sido: Hopkins me ofrece el mismo sueldo que Vs. Me ofrecieron por el curso normal, sueldo que no suele ser corriente en esta Escuela. Comprenderá V. que ante actitud tan inequívocamente cordial y generosa, no me era posible, en conciencia, negarme a esos requerimientos, ya que hubiera sido una prueba de ingratitud y

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desconsideración a la Universidad donde llevo ocho años de labor. (Pedro Salinas Papers, box 11)4

Politically, the years after the end of World War II had been an emotional roller coaster for most Spanish Republican exiles. As I explained earlier, from 1946 to 1948, the first years of the so-called post-war period of “containment” in USA history (Dailey 201), all hopes for ousting Franco seemed to vanish, and the excitement and hope abruptly changed to melancholy and sometimes despair. Regarding his exiled condition and Spanish fascism, we know now, after the publication of most of his vast correspondence, unpublished literary texts and non-fiction pieces, that Salinas was a man of principles. In his letters to friends and family, he made it clear that he would never go back to Spain if Franco was in power, not even to visit. In the summer of 1949, he traveled to France, Italy and Algeria with his wife to visit her family, but not to Spain.5 He also refused to send any of his writings for publication in Spain if they were to be vetted by censors.6 Since his arrival in the USA, he had lectured repeatedly about the situation in Spain, against European fascism, and in favor of the Spanish democratic government although, as Escartín Gual explains, he was afraid of the negative professional repercussions of publishing some of those lectures that, together with a number of antifascist satirical poems remained unpublished until the 2010s (390-6). In these circumstances, El valor de la vida —a novel about existential preoccupations, about the crisis of values in the Western world 4 5 6

In a letter dated on December 9, 1948, President Bowman confirms that his salary has been readjusted to $8,000 annually, and invites Salinas and his baby grandson, Carlos Marichal, to visit his office one day (Pedro Salinas Papers, box 2). We know that Salinas finished writing the draft of the first part of El valor de la vida as we know it today on July 16, 1949. Later that month he departed towards Europe and never returned to the project (Vara Ferrero, “El lugar” 76). These are also the years in which a new wave of Spanish exile intellectuals arrived to the USA from previous destinations such as Antonio Sánchez Barbudo, from Mexico in 1945, and Carlos Clavería, from Uppsala in 1946; or from Francoist Spain, such as Concha Zardoya in 1947. Sánchez Barbudo was a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison when Salinas was offered a position in 1948.

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from the perspective of two characters that belong to different generations of Spanish exiles or refugees in the USA— took shape. An unnamed character-narrator who is himself an already settled Spanish exile is sent to pick up Gloria Jáuregui, a young Spanish refugee, at the train station of an unnamed American city. During the next few weeks, he shows her around the city and brings her to rooftop bars, coffee shops, and even a cabaret club. During these encounters, Gloria tells him the story of her life in Spain before and during the war as they explore the cityscape and reflect on American culture. We access her life story through the unnamed character-narrator’s account. Clearly infatuated, the narrator continually objectifies her, and fantasizes about her. His mediation accounts for what we today, from the lenses of feminist cultural criticism, would call a traditional scopophilic male gaze that portrays a univocal male-centered worldview. In addition to his traditional masculine erotic inclinations, in his fantasies the narrator imagines what she might be thinking while getting to know the city and American culture; that is, a projection of his own experience and thoughts about cultural difference from his already acculturated perspective as a settled exile. Critics Natalia Vara Ferrero and José Paulino Ayuso, and more recently Monserrat Escartín Gual in her critical biography Pedro Salinas, una vida de novela (2020), are the only ones who have written extensively about El valor de la vida so far. Paulino Ayuso studies the novel as a female Bildungsroman and locates it within the Hispanic literary traditions of the intellectual novel and the lyrical novel, due to Salinas’s dense existential preoccupations and his highly poetic writing style (70).7 Gloria is an orphan whose experience as an assistant nurse during the civil war accounts for her passing into adulthood, especially with regard to her sexual awakening. Working in the military hospital also provides her with the opportunity to meet an American volunteer nurse who teaches her English using the Bible and a copy

7

Paulino Ayuso also reads the novel in connection with Salinas’s poetry collection Todo más claro, completed in Puerto Rico and published in 1949, as well as to many of the plays he also wrote in exile.

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of the Sears and Roebuck catalog as textbooks. After the war, she is selected as the refugee whom Mrs. Harrison, a well-off widow and benefactor, sponsors to come to the United States. Mr. and Mrs. Harrison had lived in Spain before the war and had won the Spanish lottery with a ticket they bought on the last day of their stay. Sponsoring a refugee was Mrs. Harrison’s way to give back to Spain, and to feel better by returning the money they won to Spain. In several studies of the novel’s manuscript drafts, Vara Ferrero eloquently examines Salinas’s struggles with articulating and structuring his ideas —“existió una gran tensión entre el plan previo y la propia redacción” (“Luces y sombras” 112)— and, even though he abandoned the project, it underscores the undisputable value of two dimensions of Salinas’s bicultural view: (1) his moral humanistic approach to the tragic and long-lasting effects of fascism and the war on the Spanish people, and (2) his more complex moral ambivalence regarding urban modernity, capitalism and puritanism in the United States. Both Vara Ferrero and Escartín Gual —in her study of the autobiographical elements in El valor de la vida (Pedro Salinas)— interpret the centrality of the encounter between the settled exiled narrator —the novelist’s alter ego— and Gloria— a refugee and his object of desire— as a symbolic way for Salinas to come to terms, through fiction writing, with his own specific privileged position as an exile. This argument is reinforced by the only poem about Salinas’s feelings of exile and the Spanish Civil War, probably written between 1937 and 1939 (Poesía inedita). In my view, this untitled poem describes the profound feeling of guilt, Salinas attempted to redeem through writing in El valor de la vida. I transcribe the opening stanza, which includes the first of a series of five rhetorical questions in the poem, one per stanza: ¡Oh vosotros, hermanos!, en la gran lejanía de esa tierra altanera que me estáis defendiendo a mí, que nací en ella,

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¿me podréis perdonar esto que yo no sufro? (242)

In addition to this attempt to address and explore his own moral accountability and feelings of guilt as an exile who left Spain in the early days of the war, I examine two relevant aspects of its connection with USA culture that have not been addressed, but are instrumental in Salinas’s plan to write this novel —its links with a particular trend in American fiction, and with Hollywood films of the 1930s and 1940s. As far as American fiction, an illuminating event happens in the chapter that describes Mrs. Harrison’s preparations prior to receiving Gloria. The narrator tells us how Mrs. Harrison seeks guidance from an advice columnist, Miss Josephine Wordly, whose daily column appears in thirty different newspapers. She was worried about where to sit Gloria at her table, and Miss Wordly gives her the solution —to sit Gloria by her on the left-side of the table: “Mrs. Harrison, leyendo el despacho de su consulta, puesto nítidamente a máquina por una de las seis secretarias de Miss Wordly, se admiró otra vez de la providencia del mundo, de la organización de la grey humana, donde se encuentra siempre contestación y alivio a la congoja que nos acucia” (137). The highly ironic tone with which the scene is described, on the edge of satire and with a hint of pessimism, the allusion to the advice columnist, and even the use of the unnamed narrator are reminiscent of Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), a novel that explores the world of American journalism and the popularity of advice columns, and expresses a profound disenchantment with the USA Depressionera. This connection allows us to clearly differentiate Salinas’s satirical tone —focused on the critique of consumerism, sensationalism, and strict societal rules— from De la Sota’s ludic and humoristic Wodehousian tone in Yanqui Hirsutus. Salinas really enjoyed going to the movies. As seen especially in letters to his daughter Solita, he especially liked historical dramas, film noir, and war films during the 1940s. When Solita was a student at Wellesley College in the early 1940s, she wrote to him about Casablanca (1942) and The Moon and Sixpence (1942), adapted from

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William Somerset Maughan’s 1919 novel, and conveyed to him how enthralled she was after watching Citizen Kane (1941) with Spanish exile and Wellesley professor Justina Ruiz de Conde: “me gustó muchísimo. No tienes más remedio que ir a verla. Creo que hará época en la historia del cine. Se acerca a la idea del cine como arte en sí que tú tienes” (Correspondence [1941]). Later in the same decade, they continued to discuss films such as Caesar and Cleopatra (1945), adapted from the homonymous 1901 play by George Bernard Shaw, Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (1944), and Roberto Rosselini’s 1945 neorealist drama Open City (Pedro Salinas Papers, box 9). For me, Salinas’s decision to write El valor de la vida, the novella La bomba increíble and the short stories in El desnudo impecable y otras narraciones (1952) had much to do with his fascination for film narratives, especially during his years in the USA, and from his desire to explore some of their formal techniques. The influence of film noir on El valor de la vida is evident in several ways. Gloria is presented as a femme fatale through the narrator’s objectifying descriptions, and through his constant prefiguring of the tragic denouement of the story. One of Salinas’s outlines for the novel kept at the archives reveals what tragic end he had in mind, suggesting that Gloria would kill Mrs. Harrison to keep her money, and that she would seduce the narrator into being her adjuvant. Additionally, the use of flashbacks to partially resolve the mystery that is constantly being prefigured by the narrator, as well as the personal background of the femme fatale, is reminiscent of classic movies of the 1940s such as the film noir Double indemnity (1944) and, of course, Citizen Kane, which Salinas probably watched following his daughter’s recommendation. The description of the first encounter between the narrator and Gloria in the train station offers another example of how Salinas was experimenting with cinematographic techniques. After a detailed description of the station, she slowly emerges from the underground railway tracks on an escalator. At this point, the narrator includes a parenthetical explanation, a kind of stage direction, about how the scene is narrated in slow motion, because his first view of the Gloria always happens in his memory in that way, over and over again:

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Por una fracción de segundos solo se vio aquella cabeza, destacada en el aire, sostenida en el tallo de un cuello delgado, alto. Y luego . . . (claro, este brotar de la figura de Gloria desde abajo fue cuestión de fracciones de segundo, en la realidad; pero hoy se me representa, y estoy seguro de que así lo midió entonces mi alma, despacísimo; porque la lente de mi asombro puso al ralentí lo que la vida me estaba trayendo en aquel instante a su andadura natural. Con la lentitud gradual de las auroras o de ciertos ademanes rituales, al manejar una imagen, así manejaban los segundos su aparición, inspirándome a mí correspondiente pasmo, que me serenó la ansiedad con que había llegado a la estación). Por fin el cuerpo rígido, tieso, en solemnidad ceremonial por la postura, pero por la mentira, por la carne reprimida y latente detrás de la seda negra que lo cubría, todo inminencia. (109-10)

The scene will recur throughout the narrative, with the escalator becoming a metaphor for the way he gains access to her life story. This use of the escalator as the place where lovers meet, as a mechanical device which is symbolic for movement and the subjective understanding of time in narrative, happens in The Clock, a 1945 drama starring Judy Garland in her first role in a non-musical film. The Clock is about the fortuitous encounter of a World War II soldier and a young woman on an escalator of Penn Station in downtown Manhattan. During the two-day layover that the soldier has in New York before going to war in Europe, the young woman shows him around the city, and they fall in love. The soldier is from a rural area in the Midwest and it is his first time in the big city. She is a secretary who migrated to the city a few months earlier and is already familiar with Manhattan. Both the escalator and the clock at the luxurious Astor Hotel —which does not exist today— are symbolic for the tensions between different understandings of time and narrative. The two strangers meet, fall in love, and marry in just two days, which is the total period of time of the story. Even though I have not found evidence in his correspondence or personal papers, it seems hard to believe that Salinas did not know this movie, or at least a synopsis of it. In El valor de la vida, he likely adapted the plot of The Clock —the newcomer or first-timer who is helped by the more experienced migrant in his visit to the city— by

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reversing the gender of the characters, adding the femme fatale figure and the flashback-based contrapuntal structure from film noir. The contrapuntal nature of the narrative in El valor de la vida also offers a good example of what Edward Said theorized regarding the plurality of vision of exiles, which “gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, and awareness that —to borrow a phrase from music— is contrapuntal” (186, his emphasis). The novel emerges from a clear awareness of a contrapuntal perspective that simultaneously constructs two narratives that represent two different chronotopes or time-spaces; one set in the place of origin, and one set in the place of destination. The unidentified narrator’s fatal attraction to Gloria, the refugee who has just arrived in the USA from post-war Spain, is not really an attraction to his place of origin. It is an attraction to imagining how new waves of exiles or immigrants would adapt to the place of destination. The eccentricity and the relevance of this unfinished novel has to do with how Salinas created a contrapuntal narrative using cinematographic techniques; that is, with his effort to amalgamate literature and film in order to construct an exile narrative that simultaneously accounts for the imagined time-space of the place of origin —the one that the displaced narrator and Salinas himself did not live, war in Spain— and the lived time-space of the exile in the United States. In this sense, Gloria’s life is all part of the narrator’s imagination. El valor de la vida is not so much a female Bildunsroman, but rather a scopophilic and imagined narrative created to remedy the narrator’s “out-of time” condition, the destiempo that characterizes the exile condition. The project ended up being too ambitious for Salinas. He never finished the novel, but some of the materials he used for El valor de la vida, which he had been accumulating and using to write his poetry collections, plays, and essays of the late 1930s and the 1940s —mainly abundant notes about American urban life, societal norms, technology and consumerism— were useful to develop his critique of capitalism in his next project, the novella La bomba increíble (1950), where the experimentation with cinematic techniques continues. Salinas’s use of certain elements from Hollywood drama and film noir movies, as well as his dialogue with contemporary trends in

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American fiction will be present in later USA-focused novels written by Spanish intellectuals in the USA. Serrano Plaja’s La cacatúa atmosférica (1977) —a novel in dialogue with the literature and film of the detective fiction tradition— is a clear example in the 1970s. The novels published by contemporary immigrant writers Gonzalo Navajas and Jesús Torrecilla that are set in Los Angeles will accentuate this double dialogue with American literature and film —Navajas’s La destrucción de la Urbe (1987) and En blanco y negro (2007), and all the novels written by Torrecilla, who considers himself a Los Angeles fiction writer in Spanish about the city: Tornados (1999), En la red (2004), Guía de Los Ángeles (2001) and Pasado de revoluciones (2016). Furthermore, reading El valor de la vida as the projection of a series of male-centered fantasies helps us understand Sender’s La tesis de Nancy and its sequels. They are not so much about the acculturation experienced by Nancy, an American graduate student who travels to Spain to do fieldwork for her thesis on Spanish gypsies, but about Sender’s projection of his own experience with cultural difference and cultural adaptation, together with his scopophilic erotic fantasies.

Works Cited Agnew, John. “Space and Place.” The Sage Handbook of Geographical Knowledge, edited by John Agnew and David Livingstone. Los Angeles: Sage, 2011, pp. 316-30. Aguirrey Lecube, José Antonio de. De Guernica a Nueva York pasando por Berlín. Buenos Aires: Editorial Vasca Ekin, 1943. Alborg, Concha. Una noche en casa. Madrid: Huerga and Fierro, 1995. Alfau, Felipe. Chromos. Funks Grove: Dalkey Archive, 1990. Dailey, Jane. Building the American Republic Volume 2: A Narrative History from 1877. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. De Azpilikoeta, Dr. The Basque Problem: As Seen by Cardinal Goma and President Aguirre. New York: The Basque Archives, 1938. Escartín Gual, Montserrat. Pedro Salinas: Una vida de novela. Madrid: Cátedra, 2019.

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González-Allende, Iker. “Estados Unidos como patria de redención: El exilio del nacionalismo vasco en Yanqui hirsutus, de Manuel de la Sota.” Cuadernos de ALDEEU 30.1 (2016), pp.13-34. Heras, Antonio. De la vida norteamericana: Impresiones frívolas. New York: Scribner, 1929. Paulino Ayuso, José. “Introducción.” El valor de la vida, by Pedro Salinas. Sevilla: Renacimiento, pp. 7-102. Said, Edward. “Reflections on Exile.” Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000, pp.173-86. Salinas, Pedro. Todo más claro y otros poemas. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1949. — La bomba increíble. Fabulación. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1950. — El desnudo impecable y otras narraciones. México: Tezontle, 1951. — Obras completas III. Epistolario, edited by Enric Bou and Andrés Soria Olmedo. Madrid: Cátedra, 2007. — El valor de la vida, edited by José Paulino Ayuso. Sevilla: Renacimiento, 2009. — Defensa del estudiante y de la Universidad, edited by Natalia Vara Ferrero. Sevilla: Renacimiento, 2011. — Dos prosas inéditas, edited by Natalia Vara Ferrero. Madrid: Devenir, 2011. — Poesía inédita, edited by Montserrat Escartín Gual. Madrid: Cátedra, 2013. Sender, Ramón J. La tesis de Nancy. Ciudad de México: Atenea, 1962. Sota, Manuel de la. Yanqui hirsutus. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1949. Torrecilla, Jesús. Tornados. Madrid: Lengua de Trapo, 1999. — Guía de Los Ángeles. Madrid: Espasa, 2001. — Enlared. Madrid: Lengua de Trapo, 2004. — Pasado de revoluciones. Barcelona: Oblicuas, 2016. UN General Assembly. Affirmation of the Principles of International Law Recognized by the Charter of the Nürnberg Trial. 11 Dec. 1946, https://www.refworld.org/docid/3b00f1ee0.html. Vara Ferrero, Natalia. “‘El lirismo de la materia bruta’: Pedro Salinas ante la gran urbe norteamericana.” Laberintos 18 (2016), pp. 243-58.

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— “El lugar de la escritura incompleta: El valor de la vida de Pedro Salinas.” Versants, Revista suiza de literatura hispánica 59.3 (2012), pp. 73-85. — “Luces y sombras de una novela inacabada: El valor de la vida de Pedro Salinas.” El hombre en la orilla. Sobre la multiplicidad de Pedro Salinas. Sevilla: Renacimiento, 2016, pp. 101-25.

Archival material Correspondence between Pedro Salinas and Solita Salinas, 19411947. Centro de Documentación de la Residencia de Estudiantes, Madrid. Pedro Salinas Papers, circa 1912-1975 (MSSpan100). Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachussets.

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Keeping Spain’s Exiles in the Americas and Maryland: “Alive in our Hearts” (1939-1989-2019) Spain’s Cultural Office, Washington D.C., October 23, 2019.

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An Exiled Basque Woman in the United States: Gender and Nation in Basque Girl (1940) by Mirim Isasi Iker González-Allende University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Isasi and Basque Nationalism in the United States Exile studies have traditionally overlooked women, who have often been perceived as companions of the men who went into exile and with no agency in the decision to leave the country. In the case of Basque women in the exile after the Spanish Civil War, the existing patriarchy caused many of them to remain in the shadows of their husbands or male relatives, unable to develop a career on their own. According to José Ramón Zabala, only 10-14% of Basque exiled women pursued intellectual work (22-23). Nevertheless, Basque women played a key role in the exile community as preservers of the national culture, transmitters of information, and caretakers of their

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families (González-Allende, “Women’s Exile” 212).1 Personal writings such as diaries, autobiographies and letters allowed them to explore their creative side, express their inner feelings to counteract their public silence, and revisit their life in their home nation. This recurrence of the lost past is a common trend in the works of exiled authors. Writing about their past becomes a means to maintain continuity in their existence and overcome the anxiety of separation from the native country, enabling self-exploration and understanding of their identity. Critics such as José María Naharro-Calderón have pointed out that writing in exile has a therapeutic function (48). For Michael Ugarte, autobiographical writing in exile constitutes a rebirth in contrast to the symbolic death that exile represents (89). Suzette Henke emphasizes the healing potential of writing autobiography because it “temporarily restores the fragmented self to an empowered position of psychological agency” (xvi). In addition, when exiled authors write about their lives in their home nation, they may achieve personal validation and foster cultural pride. Thus, remembering the past in exile may entail a political function when the nation’s freedom and civil rights have been abolished, as it happened during Franco’s dictatorship. The therapeutic and political aspects of writing in exile about the home nation left behind appear clearly in Basque Girl, an autobiographical novel that Mirim Isasi published originally in English in California in 1940. In it, the author tells her life under the name of Erena —her middle name— from her childhood years in the Basque countryside to her move to England to study at a school, her arranged engagement with Quinzano —a Basque pelota player who ultimately dies while fighting for the Basque Country during a riot in Bilbao, and her final decision to flee into exile during the Spanish Civil War and earn a living on her own. Thus, the novel focuses exclusively on Erena’s life in the Basque Country and, excluding the

1

Some of the most well-known Basque women intellectuals in exile were Aurora Arnaiz, Ernestina de Champourcin, María Luisa Elío, Cecilia G. de Guilarte, Dolores Ibárruri, María de Maeztu, and Pilar de Zubiaurre.

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fact that she is performing as a dancer, offers no information about her life in exile.2 Mirim Isasi was the pseudonym of Rosita Durán, a Basque woman who studied in England and went into exile to Mexico in 1937 and later to the United States, where she worked as a dancer and spoke in lectures about the Basque Country. She probably used a pseudonym to protect her family name and create a new persona during her life in exile, since, at that time, publishing books and dancing were not considered respectable occupations for women in the patriarchal Basque Country. In addition to this novel, she also published White Stars of Freedom (1942) in collaboration with an American author, Melcena Burns Denny, which recounts the story of a Basque teenage shepherd who, through his friendship with a Basque migrant man who owns a ranch in Idaho, goes into exile to the United States during the Spanish Civil War and decides to become an American citizen and join the Marines to fight during the Second World War (González-Allende, “El nacionalismo vasco”). Isasi herself became a citizen of the United States in 1942 and, according to Anna Aguirre and Koldo San Sebastián, volunteered to work as an ambulance driver in San Diego, there being no further information about her since then (235). In Basque Girl, Isasi expresses her national pride and offers an idealized vision of the Basque Country as a lost paradise, focusing on its ancestral traditions and the countryside as the essence of the nation. The author romanticizes the Basque Country and portrays herself as the embodiment of the nation to cope with exile, and increase her personal validation and cultural pride against the uncertainty and uprootedness that exile causes. The novel also had a propagandistic intention, with a very similar political ideology to that of the works published in English by the Delegation of the exiled Basque Government in the United States to gain support for the Basque cause against

2

On the front flap of the book jacket, readers learn that this is the author’s first book and that it offers the customs and traditions of the Basque people “from within”: “A book about the Basque people written by a Basque! There have not been many.”

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Franco’s dictatorship. On the other hand, Basque Girl is also relevant when examining and understanding the connections between gender and displacement, since the main character attains more independence while living in England and, once she returns to the Basque Country, starts to question the traditional gender values that her Basque family imposes on her. Erena learns in England that a woman has the right to be free, have her own career, and choose not to marry. Her subsequent exile confirms her independence as a woman and makes possible her self-realization as a dancer. Since her time in England, she feels she is no longer exclusively Basque, as she rejects her home nation’s patriarchal ideology. The result is her adoption of modern customs from other cultures as well as her adherence to Basque traditions. Despite the nostalgia, exile is depicted as a positive change for her because of the freedom she can experience when living abroad. Isasi’s works are truly an exception in the Basque cultural production of the Spanish Civil War exile. Aside from the members of the Basque Government, few Basques went into exile to the United States due to the differences in language and the country’s restrictive migration policies. In relation to the Spanish Republican exile in the United States, Sebastiaan Faber and Cristina Martínez-Carazo state that the exile communities were dispersed geographically across the country, creating a feeling of isolation, and were not politically active, with a moderate liberalism and anticommunism prevailing (Contra el olvido 16). Basque nationalist exiles, however, worked intensely to promote their political ideology in the United States, especially during the presence of Lehendakari José Antonio Aguirre in the New York Delegation of the Basque Government from 1941 to 1945. Members of the Delegation such as Manuel de la Sota and Antón de Irala strived to influence the Catholic media and American public opinion, raise funds from American citizens, and attract Basque migrants to Basque nationalist politics. To win Americans’ support for the Basque cause, they collaborated with the Allies during the Second World War and participated in spy networks in favor of the United States (Granja 71). They also published six issues of a political magazine, Basques: Bulletin of the Basque Delegation in the USA (1943-1944), as well as works expressing the uniqueness of the Basque Country and its simi-

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larities with the United States, such as the novel Yanqui hirsutus, by Sota —written in 1946 but published in 1949 in Buenos Aires— and the memoirs De Guernica a Nueva York, pasando por Berlín, by Aguirre —published in 1943 in Buenos Aires and translated into English as Escape via Berlin in 1944. Like these two works, Basque Girl aims at promoting the Basque culture and its ancestral values in the United States, aligning with the official discourse of Basque nationalism in exile. For this reason, Manuel de la Sota mentions Isasi and her book in a letter addressed to Jon Bilbao in 1940, pointing out that, although the novel contains many mistakes, it could not have better intentions (San Sebastián 462). In the acknowledgements section of White Stars of Freedom, Isasi and Denny also thank Sota for providing them with information about Basque culture. However, an important difference between Basque Girl and the works by Sota and Aguirre is that the former does not offer opinions about the United States, since the main character centers her narration on her childhood and youth in the Basque Country. The United States appears primarily as the author’s country of residence at the beginning of the novel: “And I, who am writing this in a place called Hollywood, on the other side of the world from the great gray stone home of the Isasis [. . .]” (14).3 Another relevant characteristic of Isasi’s novel is that it was originally written in English, which was very uncommon in the literary creation of Basque exiles. This explains why several critics such as Richard Etulain, David Río Raigadas and Victoria Bañales Atxirika include Isasi’s works within the Basque-American production. However, as the author fled into exile in 1937, I believe that her experience would not be the same as that of the second generation of Basque migrants in the United States or Basque migrants living there for a significant part of their lives. Furthermore, the political ideology pre-

3

It is also mentioned that in Miami the pelota game is being introduced (167) and that the Apache dance in America tells a story as do Basque dances (129). The protagonist narrator also explains that the ball used to play pelota is “smaller than the baseball I have seen in America, but just as heavy” (156).

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sent in Basque Girl constitutes a stark difference from the BasqueAmerican literature, which only emphasizes Basque cultural aspects. According to Gloria Totoricagüena, Basque migrants in the United States are not interested in homeland politics, but rather in cultural activities, and most of the Basque Centers declare in their statutes that they are apolitical institutions (110-11). Isasi’s positive experience in the United States also seems to differ from that of Basque migrant women, who were normally married and suffered from isolation due to their inability to express themselves in English (Totoricagüena 103). The fact that Isasi learned English in a British school allowed her to experience exile in a more favorable way. The host country where she lived was also important, since in the United States, with a small Basque and Spanish exile community and a liberal conception of gender roles, she, as a single woman with no family responsibilities, was able to enjoy more freedom than other Basque women living in countries such as Mexico, with a much larger exile community that exerted more control over women’s actions.

The Basque Nation: Female Personification and Idealization The idealization of Basque culture in Basque Girl is not only the result of the author’s nostalgia for her home nation, but also serves a political function: informing Americans about the Basque Country and attracting their support for the Basque cause during Franco’s dictatorship. Mari Jose Olaziregi claims that the novel reproduces the values of Sabino Arana’s nationalism by presenting the Basque Country as Catholic, Basque-speaking, and with a noble history (114). This appears clearly on the first two pages of the book, which affirm the antiquity of the Basque nation and its oppression under both Spain and France: “that grand old Basque land which has remained through time always one in soul, though two in the minds of world conquerors and mapmakers. [. . .] Yet imperial France and greedy Spain, two dogs on a bone, had failed really to pull Basque land apart” (11-12).

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The author’s love for the Basque Country is depicted later in the book with the drawing of a map where the four Basque provinces in Spain —including Navarre— form the shape of a heart (144) (Figure 1). The fact that the word “Spain” appears underneath the Basque Country shows the belief that the Basque Country constitutes its own national identity, separate from that of Spain.4 In addition to this drawing, the book contains many others representing manifold aspects of traditional Basque culture such as farm utensils and rural landscapes, as well as numerous photographs of the author’s family farm, popular celebrations (dances, rural sports), and even Isasi herself in Basque surroundings. The illustrations and photographs in the novel have a didactic and propagandistic function: their objective is to provide authenticity for the story, make it more believable to the American readers, and gather their sympathy for the Basque cause. Isasi is portrayed on three different occasions: riding a donkey (55), standing dressed in a traditional Basque costume in front of a couple of oxen in a wheat field (145), and smiling seated in her Basque costume in front of an ikurriña, the Basque flag (Figure 2). The latter photograph, included on both the book jacket and the first page of the novel, is especially relevant because the author is depicted as a personification of the Basque nation in exile, and the Basque flag contains Sabino Arana’s motto, “Jaun Goikua eta legi zaŕa” (“God and the old laws”). Furthermore, the caption of the photograph emphasizes the political oppression of Basque culture under Franco’s dictatorship: “Mirim Isasi with the Basque flag, which has now been suppressed.” Isasi uses a common rhetoric of Basque nationalism in the 1930s, which, as Nerea Aresti points out, often represented the nation as a female figure, both in discourses and in literary works such as Libe, Manuel de la Sota’s adaptation of Sabino Arana’s original play (299). National ideologies tend to symbolize nations as mothers so that citizens can imagine the nation more easily and believe in its continuity and future (González-Allende, Líneas de fuego 49). Nevertheless,

4 In White Stars of Freedom, Isasi and Denny express the same idea: “Our Basque provinces may belong to France and Spain, but inside [. . .] we are free” (54).

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this type of personification homogenizes female identity following an ideal of respectability and eliminating women’s multiple real experiences in society (Eisenstein 41). Nira Yuval-Davis also criticizes the fact that, even though women reproduce the nation biologically, culturally and symbolically, they are often excluded or hidden in the theorizations of the nation (2). The photograph on the book jacket of Basque Girl identifies the author with this traditional notion of national women as beautiful, smiling and virtuous, while her sitting position implies passivity and little agency. However, the narration of her story reveals a more complex reality than this photograph, since she revolts against Basque women’s submission to their husbands and identity as housewives, and takes charge of her life by leaving Spain and earning a living on her own. Her depiction as an allegory of the Basque Country and her strong political loyalty increase her respectability in the national community and counteract any possible criticism for not being married and working as a dancer. In this regard, Miren Llona mentions that the figure of the mother nation allowed Basque women to subvert their traditional roles and participate as public speakers of Basque nationalism (459). In Basque Girl, women are also identified with the baserri or farmhouse, since Erena’s grandmother is the one who supervises the house and makes all the decisions while her father is usually absent on work trips: “she must have been a sort of genius as an executive and manager. Though the men were far away, there were no wolves at our door” (15). The author’s farm was built in the 17th century and symbolizes her ancestors and the continuation of the Basque nation: “it was the ancestral estate of the Isasi family. I do not know how long it had been the birthplace of Isasis, but I know that my great grandfather was rocked to sleep in the same cradle that I was rocked in” (12). The farm has such an influence on the author that she remembers its living room every time she needs stability in her life in exile: “If in these later years my mind is a vessel adrift in a sea of thoughts, it finds an anchor in the picture of that pleasant, calm, solid old room” (33). The Basque language performs a similar emotional role for her: “Even today, whenever I feel deeply, I find myself using the words of my beloved and secret Euskara” (177). Isasi stresses the distinctive-

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ness of the Basque language, which she qualifies as “private” because only Basques can speak it (177). Similarly, she discusses the unknown origins of the Basque people, dating them back to times before Christ (215), therefore depicting Basque culture as a unique and ancient civilization that needs to be protected. The Basque language, history and traditions are closely connected to Erena’s grandmother, since she was responsible for her primary education and taught her all she knew before going to the British school. Thus, the novel presents women as bearers and transmitters of the national culture. Erena learns from her grandmother numerous Basque legends and beliefs; the primitive Basque paintings and hieroglyphics in the caves both of them visit; the traditional folk dances, which unlike those of Europe, are pantomime and tell a story; and the game of pelota, considered a product of the Basque nation because of its people’s swift and active bodies. Erena praises the preservation of these traditions throughout the centuries: “the Basque people have remained unchanged and true to ancient customs while all the other people of Europe have done the thing they call progress” (45). For this reason, Isasi feels the responsibility of recounting about the Basque Country in her book to fulfill her propagandistic role as a woman of the nation. Her message is that the Basque nation holds an exceptional and distinctive rich culture that Americans should help to protect, since it is being oppressed under Franco’s dictatorship. To arouse Americans’ sympathy and support for the Basque cause, Isasi highlights freedom as a typical value of the Basques, a principle that is also greatly appreciated in the United States.5 In White Stars of Freedom, Isasi and Denny state it clearly to accentuate the similarities between Euskadi and the United States: “Basques, like Americans, have always loved freedom” (307). Basque Girl opens with a dedication with the same message: “To the unconquerable Basque love of freedom, which, crushed and broken, will yet rise again, this volume is prayerfully dedicated” (5). An identical idea is repeated on the last page of

5 In Yanqui hirsutus, Sota also described the United States as a land of liberty (González-Allende, “Estados Unidos” 25).

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the novel: “the Guernikaco Arbola, the national anthem of the Basque people [. . .] is the song of freedom; freedom so loved by our people, freedom now shackled for a time, but always to be revived” (249).6 The author emphasizes the need of a small nation such as the Basque Country to seek the alliance and assistance of the United States, since not only does the Basque Country have an ancient and unique culture, but also shares similar values to those of the United States.

Gender and Displacement For Erena, freedom is an essential principle of the nation that should have practical implications for the existence of Basque women. After studying abroad, she realizes that what she really wishes for her life is to be independent: “freedom to laugh, to dance, to learn more English and more about the great world, that was all I wanted” (118). Her conception of gender modifies significantly while living in England, where she adopts a more liberal understanding of womanhood that questions the conventional Basque gender system. Erena’s story reveals how migration and exile can be liberating for women who come from cultures with traditional gender values. Scholars on gender and migration such as Oliva Espín have stated that migration opens more alternatives for women than for men in the new country, modifying their societal functions and sexual behavior more dramatically (24142). Silvia Pedraza also claims that migration allows women to break with traditional roles and achieve more freedom (321).7

6

7

Isasi makes a mistake here, since the national anthem of the Basque Country is not “Gernikako arbola” (“The Tree of Gernika”), but “Eusko Abendaren Ereserkia” (“Anthem of the Basque Race”), adopted by the first Basque Government in 1936 and later by the Basque Parliament in 1983. Nevertheless, migration can also be restrictive for women, since in the host country migrant communities may exert a stricter control over their bodies and sexual behavior to preserve the ideal of the virtuous woman from their homeland (Espín 242). Furthermore, despite having new job opportunities in the host country, migrant women continue to be identified as wives and mothers (Pedraza 322).

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However, until Erena goes into exile, she contends with internal conflict between her family’s expectations of her and her desire to take charge of her own life. Her grandmother has a great influence on her, since she teaches her how to become a proper Basque woman. The grandmother is described as resilient, adventurous and intelligent, even an expert in old Basque history and language. She represents the model of the strong Basque woman that, according to Nerea Aresti, was highly valued in Basque nationalism (284-85). In contrast, Erena’s mother and sister are portrayed as passive women dedicated to weaving, reading and playing the piano. Erena does not feel connected to them and, instead, bonds completely with her grandmother. Although the protagonist learns from her grandmother that women can be strong and independent, she also teaches her that women need to be virtuous, marry the man chosen by their parents, become good housewives, and submit to men. Her grandmother insists on the importance of young women behaving modestly: “The good manners of the Basque maiden must go with her wherever she goes” (83). Thus, she tells Erena that women should not question their arranged marriages and that happy relationships are based on husbands who are not present in the household as equal partners: “When you get a home to look after, you will soon learn not to want a man under foot all the time” (159). Erena’s absent father represents this gender model, as even though he sends his daughter to study in England, he believes that the only purpose of women’s education should be to prepare them as future wives and mothers: “I don’t want my daughter to become a prodigy of learning —but just to speak good English, and to have enough of art, music, and literature to make her a woman who can help her husband and give pleasure to her family” (94). From ages nine to fouteen, Erena boards at the Sloan Hendrick Academy in Essex, where she experiences many of the difficulties typical of a displaced individual. She has problems understanding and communicating in English, struggles to adapt herself to daily life at the English school, endures homesickness, and even suffers bullying from her classmates, who make fun of her for being a foreigner and lacking a uniform like theirs. However, thanks to the friendship with her roommate, Elizabeth, Erena overcomes these obstacles and begins

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to enjoy her life in England: “Before many months had passed, I felt no longer a stranger in a strange land, but had slipped into the routine of school life, busy and content. [. . .] I walked about the campus with Elizabeth or played the English games of tennis or basketball” (106). She also discovers a more liberal conception of gender that considers women as equal partners to men and starts to question the dominant role of Basque men: “What, I wondered, would it be like to have an English husband? Ah —English men were sweethearts before they were husbands” (118). When Erena returns to the Basque Country at fourteen, she is reluctant to accept the expected traditional behavior of Basque women. For instance, she decides not to be her sister’s attendant during her wedding, signifying her rejection of that conventional female role. She also complains about her father receiving special treatment during the preparations for the wedding: “I suggested that, after all, he was merely a man like the rest of us” (122). She concludes that she does not want to become a wife like her mother, always in a submissive position in the household: “mother was a quiet, ghostlike figure that moved quietly about in the background of our lives. [. . .] much of the time Father seemed unconscious of her presence” (117). Nor does she wish to wholeheartedly follow her grandmother’s model because, although she enjoyed a status of some dignity, “she was ready to take orders” as soon as the man of the family returned from his travels (117). Erena also starts hesitating about her arranged betrothal to Quinzano. When her grandmother celebrates her engagement because it will mean wealth and high social status for her, she asks her whether those aspects will entail true happiness. Due to his reputation as a famous pelota player, Erena believes that Quinzano is used to receiving praise and women’s attention: “He would wear a woman as he wears his cesta, while it suited him to play, and would then take her off, put her carefully away like any valuable thing, and leave her so” (159). When she spends an evening talking to him, her fears are confirmed, since Quinzano enjoys bragging about his accomplishments and tries to woo her by flattering her. Erena dislikes Quinzano’s traditional attitude with her and even compares his words to pelotas and herself

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to a frontón wall; that is, she feels objectified and in a subordinated position.8 Although she accepts marrying him to follow the family convention, their marriage will never happen because Quinzano, a strong supporter of the Basque Nationalist Party, ultimately dies while fighting for his political beliefs during a riot in Bilbao. Quinzano’s death frees Erena to take control of her life and make her own decisions. She feels attracted to James, Elizabeth’s fiancé, who visits the Basque Country to do archeological work, but she avoids starting a romantic relationship with him to remain loyal to her friend and to the memory of her deceased fiancé. Thus, the author emphasizes Basque women’s good morals and follows the traditional tendency in national ideologies of representing the women of the nation as pure and virtuous. In addition to Quinzano’s passing, the deaths of her mother and grandmother and the disappearance of her father motivate Erena to flee into exile on her own. At the same time, the lack of close family members and responsibilities is what makes it possible for a woman of her condition to leave the country alone. When her grandmother dies, Erena feels that her life in the Basque Country is over: “What does one do when left standing alone among the ruins of one’s former life?” (246). As her grandmother was the heart of her household and the one who transmitted to Erena the Basque traditions, her death symbolizes the downfall of Euskadi under Francoist forces. Exile appears here as the only available option for the protagonist to escape her personal and national adversities and be free. Erena’s previous positive migration incentivizes her to leave the country again and find a way to earn a living on her own. At the beginning of the novel, she justifies her displacement by mentioning that she is like both her grandfather —a self-taught doctor— and her father —a businessman, who were constantly traveling. Thus, Erena

8 In White Stars of Freedom, Begoña also rejects her betrothal to Valintin and stands up for her right to be independent, for instance, in choosing her husband, working at a hotel, and not wearing a headscarf. Like Erena, Begoña symbolizes a new, modern Basque woman, but she also goes into exile to the United States, where she teaches Spanish.

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connects herself with the male members of her family to assert her right to reside away from home. This time, however, she decides to epitomize the exiled Basque nation in herself, as previously shown in the photograph on the book jacket, to revive its shackled culture. To that end, she also starts a professional career in dancing and expresses, through her body movements, Basque traditions, such as Etchia —the God of Light, Emakume— the old lady of the mountain, and the Guernikaco Arbola —a popular song of the Basque people (249). Therefore, dancing is her means to remain connected to her homeland and participate in the promotion of Basque nationalist politics: “our dances are just our way of expressing our patriotism” (228). Dancing is also a manifestation of her own freedom and independence as a woman after being subjugated by the traditional Basque gender system. She can only pursue her chosen career when she is distant from her family and nation, since dancing was considered an amoral and inappropriate occupation for a respectable woman: “I wanted to be a dancer. But Basque women do not dance for money. [. . .] For a daughter of the Isasi to become a professional dancer would be a disgrace so black that it could never be lived down nor forgotten” (175). To counteract these societal reservations and possible criticism from compatriots in exile —where it is common to police the bodies and behaviors of the nation’s women to assert moral superiority over the host culture, she points out that, being single and with no family, it was the best available option for her to earn a living and honor the Basque Country: “Faced by necessity, I found that the dances of my people could be made to produce dollars” (247). Therefore, she justifies her dancing as an acceptable career based on her personal situation and her political and patriotic motivation. At the same time, through her dances and her writing, she is rebelling against Basque women’s traditional gender roles and adopting an active stance in the public sphere of Basque nationalism. On the other hand, Erena also claims that her dances are not only from the Basque Country, but also from Spain, originating from Madrid and Barcelona, or simply “the expression of moods, emotions, and experiences” (248). This reveals a more complex national identity than what at first sight appears on the photograph of the book

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jacket and in the last words of the novel, where she identifies herself as exclusively Basque: “Devotion to Home, Pride of Race, Love of Tradition —I am Basque. Gora Euzkadi!” (249). Significantly, when Erena returns to the Basque Country from her English school, she discloses having developed a mixed national identity: “I was now a hybrid —not English surely, but never more would I be entirely Basque” (116). In exile, her multiple cultural experiences reflected in her various dances also reveal a national identity that is not only circumscribed to the Basque Country. In fact, by 1942 Isasi had become a citizen of the United States, the same as her main character in White Stars of Freedom. For this reason, she criticizes and rebels against certain aspects of the Basque culture that she considers patriarchal and oppressive for women, but also appreciates many other Basque traditions.9 For instance, in the moment of writing in exile, when instability and the unexpected prevail, she even acknowledges some value in arranged Basque marriages: From the moment of my birth my way had been chosen and my future planned. If often I had resented the fact that I was but one unit in a pattern of life designed long ago and changed but little by the times, I realized now that in such a pattern there was unity and order and a certain beauty not found in lives where pattern and design are lacking and only change is certain. (244)

In general, Erena advocates keeping most of the Basque customs, rejecting others, and adding new ones from other cultures she values, mixing tradition and modernity on her own terms.10 9

Similarly, she praises how in England women behave as equal partners to men, but criticizes other realities of British society such as divorce and the poor living conditions of impoverished people. 10 In White Stars of Freedom, Begoña also expresses the Basque Country’s need to preserve its past but also to look at the future for new ideas such as the modernization of women’s traditional roles: “We are thankful with all our hearts for our brave past. But it must not drag us back from growth. Growth means a lift, a release. For some of us may mean a transplanting. [. . .] We must not let the past tighten about our roots” (262).

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Conclusion Basque Girl is a relevant work to understand the role of Basque nationalism in exile in the United States. Through an autobiographical narration of her childhood and teenage years, Isasi writes a novel of growth with a strong didactic and propagandistic component addressed to American readers and Basque-American communities to gather their support for the Basque cause against Franco’s dictatorship. The author portrays a romanticized and idyllic Basque rural countryside that is presented as the essence of a primitive and unaltered Basque nation. This image is the result of her being in exile and viewing her homeland as a lost paradise. It is also intended to instill in American readers the uniqueness of the Basque culture, stressing values such as freedom and good morals, for them to consider the Basque Country as a sister nation with similar principles that deserves the protection of the United States. The opening and ending of the novel refer to the current oppression of Basque people and the elimination of their freedom to encourage readers to act quickly to avoid the disappearance of such a special culture. The numerous illustrations and photographs included in the volume give a sense of authenticity and true testimony to the narration. Nevertheless, the author does not unconditionally praise Basque culture, since the protagonist manifests her rejection of the traditional Basque gender roles that impose on women arranged marriages, an identity as homemakers, an absence of professional careers, and submission to their husbands. She discovers the existence of other possibilities for women’s lives while studying in England, and, from that point onwards, struggles to accept the prevalent gender system in her national culture. Even though her grandmother represents the model of the strong Basque woman because of her willpower and intelligence, she still wants Erena to follow a conventional life path and become a housewife and mother. Erena’s wish to take charge of her own life is only possible when her fiancé dies unexpectedly in a street riot and her future is no longer decided for her. If migration

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allows her to be acquainted with alternative models for women, such as jobs and equal relationships with men, it is exile after the death of her mother and grandmother that makes her wish for independence and her career as a dancer possible. Exile appears as a liberating experience for women who come from cultures with traditional gender roles. Despite the homesickness and idealization of the homeland, exile is not depicted as a tragic event, but as an opportunity to expand her life and enrich her national identity, which is no longer one and only. She is Basque, but English too, and later she will become an American citizen, demonstrating the possibility of a transmigrant existence.

Works Cited Aguirre, Anna and Koldo San Sebastián. Newyorktarrak: Origen de la comunidad vasca de Nueva York, 1880-1955. Vitoria-Gasteiz: Gobierno Vasco, 2018. Aguirre, José Antonio. De Guernica a Nueva York, pasando por Berlín. Bilbao: Ekin, 1992. Aresti, Nerea. “De heroínas viriles a madres de la patria. Las mujeres y el nacionalismo vasco (1893-1937).” Historia y Política 31 (2014), pp. 281-308. Bañales-Atxirika, Victoria. Literary Portraits of Basque-American Women: From Shadow to Presence. Bilbao: Universidad del País Vasco, dissertation, 2015. Eisenstein, Zillah. “Writing Bodies on the Nation for the Globe.” Women, States and Nationalisms: At Home in the Nation?, edited by Sita Ranchod-Nilsson and Mary Ann Tétreault. London: Routledge, 2000, pp. 35-53. Espín, Oliva M. “Gender, Sexuality, Language, and Migration.” Cultural Psychology of Immigrants, edited by Ramaswami Mahalingam, Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2006, pp. 241-58. Etulain, Richard. “The Basques in Western American Literature.” Anglo-American Contributions to Basque Studies: Essays in Honor of Jon Bilbao, Reno: Desert Research Institute, 1977, pp. 7-18.

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Faber, Sebastiaan and Martínez Carazo, Cristina (eds.). Contra el olvido: El exilio español en Estados Unidos. Alcalá de Henares: Instituto Franklin de Estudios Norteamericanos, 2010. González-Allende, Iker. Líneas de fuego: Género y nación en la narrativa española durante la Guerra Civil (1936-1939). Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2011. — “Women’s Exile and Transatlantic Epistolary Ties in the Work of Pilarde Zubiaurre.” Hispania 95.2 (2012), pp. 211-26. — “Estados Unidos como patria de redención: El exilio del nacionalismo vasco en Yanqui hirsutus, de Manuel de la Sota.” Cuadernos de ALDEEU 30.1 (2016), pp.13-34. — “El nacionalismo vasco en el exilio en los Estados Unidos: masculinidad vasca e identidad transnacional en White Stars of Freedom (1942), de Mirim Isasiy Melcena Burns Denny.” Revista de Lenguas y Literaturas Catalana, Gallega y Vasca 25 (2020), pp. 187-215. Granja Sainz, José Luis de la. El nacionalismo vasco (1876-1975), Madrid: Arco-Libros, 2000. Henke, Suzette A. Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life-writing. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998. Isasi, Mirim. Basque Girl. Glendale: Griffin-Patterson, 1940. — and Melcena Burns Denny. White Stars of Freedom. Chicago: Albert Whitman, 1942. Llona, Miren. “Polixene Trabudua, historia de vida de una dirigente del nacionalismo vasco en la Vizcaya de los años treinta.” Historia Contemporánea 21 (2000), pp. 459-84. Naharro-Calderón, José María. Entre el exilio y el interior: el “entresiglo” y Juan Ramón Jiménez. Barcelona: Anthropos, 1994. Olaziregi, Mari Jose. “Las representaciones de la diáspora en la literatura infantil y juvenil vasca.” Anuario de Investigación en Literatura Infantil y Juvenil 8 (2010) pp. 111-21. Pedraza, Silvia. “Women and Migration: The Social Consequences of Gender.” Annual Review of Sociology 17 (1991), pp.303-25. Río Raigadas, David. “Escritores de origen vasco en los Estados Unidos: Una visión panorámica.” XV Congreso de Estudios Vascos: Ciencia y cultura vasca, y redes telemáticas, Donostia-San Sebastián, Eusko Ikaskuntza, 2002, pp.675-80.

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San Sebastián, Koldo. The Basque Archives: Vascos en Estados Unidos (1938-1943). Donostia-San Sebastián: Txertoa, 1991. Sota, Manuel de la. Yanqui hirsutus. Pequeñas conversaciones sin importancia sobre los habitantes del nuevo mundo anglosajón. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1949. Totoricagüena, Gloria. “Interconnected Disconnectedness: How Diaspora Basque Women Maintain Ethnic Identity.” Amatxi, Amuma, Amona: Writings in Honor of Basque Women, edited by Linda White and Cameron Watson. Reno: Center for Basque Studies, 2003, pp. 99-118. Ugarte, Michael. Shifting Ground: Spanish Civil War Exile Literature. Durham: Duke University Press, 1989. Yuval-Davis, Nira. Gender and Nation. London: Sage, 1997. Zabala, José Ramón. “El exilio más oculto: Intelectuales y artistas vascas en el exilio.” Non zeuden emakumeak? La mujer vasca en el exilio de 1936, edited by José Ramón Zabala. Donostia-San Sebastián: Saturrarán, 2007, pp. 21-35.

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Map of the Basque Country in Spain. (Figure 1)

Mirim Isasi, in a traditional Basque costume, with the ikurriña. (Figure 2)

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Juan Ramón Jiménez and Zenobia Camprubí in the USA: Between the Hard Rock of Ethics and the Wall of Aesthetics 1936-1939-1951 José María Naharro-Calderón University of Maryland

Cultural isolation in a new receptive territory is one of the many roadblocks stalling the itinerary of an exile writer. Through the vast Spanish exiles of 1939 in the Americas, we may find the so-called more benign and idealized refuge in Spanish speaking countries: the transtierro or “translanding”, as José Gaos coined it for the exiled intellectuals that landed in large quantities in Mexico or Cuba.1 In that line, Juan Ramón Jiménez felt himself coterrado [co-landed] through his different Caribbean residences (Cuba 1937-1939, Puerto Rico 1936 and 19511

See Sánchez Vázquez’s double binding account of transtierro.

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1958). But for over more than half of his exile, between 1939 and 1951 in the USA, the poet from Moguer felt segregated by the English linguistic barrier, through which he did not enjoy communicating. Due to the fact that his solidarious companion, Zenobia Camprubí, who took care of daily chores, was fluent in English, he managed to survive during those years, although the impossibility of speaking Spanish regularly, or the association of local landscapes with the memory of Spanish spaces repeatedly plunged him into several depressive abysses, at Coral Gables, Washington D.C. and Maryland. Finally, and much to her regret, Zenobia decided to transfer him to Puerto Rico in 1951 in order to recover his vital tone, where they managed until her death in 1956. “The exile of my different language, superior to all joy, to all indifference, to all freedom, to all pain. I can’t bear it. Because ‘exiled’, not having my languages around me, I do nothing, I am nobody, I am more dead than dead, I am lost” [El destierro de mi lengua diferente, superior a toda alegría, a toda indiferencia, a toda libertad, a toda pena. No la puedo soportar. Porque ‘desterrado’, no tener lenguas mías a mi alrededor, no hago nada, no soy nadie, estoy más muerto que muerto, estoy perdido”] (Guerra en España 48). Nevertheless, throughout that USA decade, and, particularly, his trip to the Southern Cone (Argentina and Uruguay) in 1948, Jiménez always attempted to stay in touch with the poetic pulse where he resided or in the Spanish speaking countries. And above all, he tried to spread his ethical aesthetics, which to a certain degree coincided with the doctrines of the former Vice President of the United States (1941-45) Henry A. Wallace. A close neighbor in Washington D.C., and a figure of great political repercussion in Latin America which he had toured in 1943, sent by President Roosevelt to block the Nazi-Fascist-imperial Axis influences and policies south of the Río Grande. Therefore, during those times, Jiménez carried on with his already established custom of following the literary movements in British and North American publications, even though his creative faculties differed at first glance from those of major contemporary poets from the United States such as Wallace Stevens or William Carlos Williams. Thus, he prolonged, in this foreign land, his ambivalent sentiment towards diverging currents, already exemplified during the Madrid

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years.2 And his decade of residence in the metropolitan area of Washington D.C. (1942-1951) was marked by the world conflict and the Cold War, when a certain ideological Manichaeism affected greatly the intellectual exchanges of the time. Consequently, Juan Ramón pursued attentively how the evolution of the world struggle could offer him an escape into exile from the Civil War, and from there, he developed and perfected his peaceful ethical aesthetics displayed in the volume never published during his lifetime: Guerra en España [War in Spain]. Jiménez justified going to his American exile early, as of September 1936, for not being “a strong man [. . . with] a fighting vocation [. . . who should] get out of the way and not get in the way” [“hombre fuerte [. . . con] vocación peleona [. . . que debe quitarse de en medio y no estorbar”] (Guerra en España 57). He also criticized the internationalization of the Spanish conflict, as a key cause for the Republican defeat, and its use by the sort of intellectual that “lead foreigners to see the war, as tourists, so they may recount it as theater: they should not celebrate the triumphs of death with banquets; they should stay away, while doing whatever they can for everyone without skimping on bread and shelter for the ones that do it all” [al “llevar a los extranjeros a que vean, como turistas, la guerra y la cuenten como teatro: no debe celebrar con banquetes los triunfos de la muerte; debe alejarse, hacer lo que pueda por todos sin mermarle pan y abrigo ni lugar al que lo hace todo”] (Guerra en España 57-58). And he also justified his lack of epic production in verse since “the poet will be silent perhaps in war” “because one should not mix war and lyrical poetry” [since] “war poetry is not written, and above all it is not written from afar, it is performed. A war poet is the one who really suffers in the city or in the country, not the one who rages from a safe refuge and believes in the efficacy of his groaning and sheltered crying” [“el poeta callará acaso en la guerra” (34) “porque no debe mezclarse guerra y lírica” (252) (ya que) “la poesía de la guerra no se escribe, y sobre todo no se escribe desde lejos, se realiza. Poeta de la guerra es el que sufre de

2

For English and North-American poetry and Jiménez, see Cano, Gullón, Pérez Romero, Pérez Gallego, Wilcox and Young.

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veras en la ciudad o en el campo, no el que se desgañita en un refujio seguro y cree en la eficacia de su jemido y su llanto resguardado” (58)] (Guerra en España). Therefore, he highlights the true pragmatism of the sole one he considers to be a war poet-soldier: Miguel Hernández, who “fought on the fronts and refused to leave his jail, where he was dying from tuberculosis while singing his love, while other comrades were still detained he was [. . .] a war hero” [“peleó en los frentes y no quiso salir de su cárcel, donde se extinguía tísico y cantando sus amores, mientras otros compañeros siguieron (d)etenidos, fue [. . .] héroe de la guerra”] (Guerra en España 58). And Jiménez remembers earlier other poetic transnational casualties of war, among them, Cuban Pablo de la Torriente: (The war poet dies in war or from the war: Pablo de la Torriente, Miguel de Unamuno, Federico García Lorca, Antonio Machado, Miguel Hernández, others.) / It is very possible that war ‘will serve them’. And it is even possible ‘that they find’ themselves or that they fall for it. / Luckily for them and for those who believe in a literature for ‘general dragging’. Because no one who knows poetry and sorrow, truth and human misery, four realities that such people don’t count on, will ever search or seek them (in verse or prose) in war or peace. [(El poeta de la guerra muere en la guerra o de la guerra: Pablo de la Torriente, Miguel de Unamuno, Federico García Lorca, Antonio Machado, Miguel Hernández, otros.) / Es muy posible que ‘les sirva’ la guerra. Y hasta es posible ‘que se encuentren’ ellos mismos o que lo crean. / Menos mal para ellos y para los que creen en la pluma de ‘arrastre jeneral’. Porque nadie que sepa de poesía y de pena, de verdad y de miseria humanas, cuatro realidades con las que los tales no cuentan, los buscó ni los buscará nunca (en el verso ni en la prosa) en la guerra ni en la paz.] (Guerra en España 43-44)3

3

During his trip to the Southern Cone in 1948, Jiménez did not stop throwing aesthetic and ethical darts against the so called committed poets, although details about their whereabouts did sometimes lack accuracy: “—León Felipe didn’t do anything for the war. He was in the Mexican Embassy, as a refugee (sic). He is a journalist who writes in verse. Miguel Hernández was in the trenches, a prisoner in jail and he did not want to be taken out of there, as long as they did not release his companions, when a Bishop friend of his wanted to protect

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On the other hand, Antonio Machado displayed during the Spanish Civil War an ethical stance, parodied by Paulino Masip’s Hamlet

him. The rest were in the embassies, in Madrid, eating very well, having great banquets every time a foreign writer showed up, but they did not go to the trenches. That is also theater. Those who like the People should go to the People, and those who do not feel it should stay home. But those who do not like the People should not speak of the People, since it is not honorable” [“—León Felipe no hizo nada de la guerra. Estaba en la Embajada de México, refugiado (sic). Es un periodista que escribe en verso. Miguel Hernández estuvo en las trincheras, prisionero en la cárcel y no quiso que lo sacaran de allí, mientras no libertaran a sus compañeros, cuando un Obispo amigo lo quiso proteger. Los demás estaban en las Embajadas, en Madrid, comiendo muy bien, dándose grandes banquetes cada vez que venía un escritor extranjero, pero no iban a las trincheras. Eso es también teatro. Al que le gusta el pueblo, debe ir al pueblo, y el que no lo siente, que no vaya. Pero no debe hablar del pueblo el que no gusta de él, no sería honrado”] (Por obra del instante 342). Earlier, he had concocted “Libelo como León Felipe” [“León Felipe’s style Libel”]: “In Cuba I learned from an eyewitness that during the war, León Felipe took refuge in the Mexican Embassy (sic), where he would protest about everything, wrapped in the great fur coat of the murdered Duke of Tserclaes (sic), (sic), and boasting, vociferating and joking about it. I thought that this coat should have been left, since it had no owner, to the poor militiamen who died from gangrene in the snow on the Teruel front. As for the Embassy food, the militiamen ate melon as a diet for fighting. Pablo de la Torriente died in the trenches, Miguel Hernández caught TB in the trenches, Gustavo Durán lived entirely in the trenches. Either not to shout so much or go to the trenches León Felipe” [“En Cuba supe por un testigo de vista, que durante la guerra, León Felipe se refujió en la Embajada de México, donde protestaba de todo, envuelto en el gran abrigo de pieles del Duque de Tserclaes asesinado, y jactándose de ello con vociferación y bromita. Pensé yo que este abrigo se lo debía haber dejado, ya que no tenía dueño, a los pobres milicianos que morían gangrenados por la nieve en el frente de Teruel. En cuanto a la comida de la Embajada los milicianos comían melón por dieta de pelea. En las trincheras murió Pablo de la Torriente, en las trincheras se puso tísico Miguel Hernández, en las trincheras vivía del todo Gustavo Durán. O no gritar tanto o irse a las trincheras, León Felipe”] (Vida: Días de mi vida 559). And in Buenos Aires, he rejected an homage in the Spanish Republican Center, sponsored by jurist and socialist Luis Jiménez de Asúa, later President of the Spanish Republic in exile (1962-1970), alluding, among other reasons, to Indalecio Prieto’s lack of support for some of Jiménez’s friends, like Díez Canedo, while having aided foes like José Bergamín. See Naharro-Calderón, Entre el exilio y el interior 195-197.

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García, “rising to the challenges and not above the muddle” [“a la altura de las circunstancias que au dessus de la mêlée”] as stated by his heteronomous Juan de Mairena. Both Jiménez and Machado, were perhaps also thinking about the reactionary stance of Ortega y Gasset, who defended neutrality in his 1936 “Prólogo para Franceses” [“A Prologue for the French”] and then presented himself as a pragmatic pacifist, while voicing his desire for the liquidation of the Popular Front left-wing options through Fascist authoritarian means, in “En torno al pacifismo” [“Regarding Pacifism”] (La rebelión de las masas [The Revolt of the Masses]).4 And perhaps the philosopher’s position is frivolous when he thinks that war is an impertinence that comes by surprise to disturb the rhythm of his meditations. Because we have all waged war and it is fair that we all suffer it; it is a moment of great controversy that constitutes our social life; no one with an average awareness may believe to be fully irresponsible. And if the war shows up in us as a surprise among our meditations, if it catches us lacking totally categories to

4

Ortega y Gasset stated: “Being from the left is, like being from the right, one of the infinite ways a man may choose in order to be an imbecile: in fact, both are forms of moral hemiplegia [... . .] For now an articulation of Europe will come through two different forms of public life: the form of a new liberalism and the form that, using a misnomer, is often called totalitarian. The lesser peoples will adopt transitional and intermediary figures. This will save Europe. Once again, it will become clear that every form of life requires its antagonist. Totalitarianism will save Liberalism, tinting it, purifying it, and thanks to this we will soon see a new liberalism temper the authoritarian regimes” [“Ser de izquierdas es, como ser de la derecha, una de las infinitas maneras que el hombre puede elegir para ser imbécil: ambas, en efecto, son formas de la hemiplejía moral [. . .] Por lo pronto vendrá una articulación de Europa en dos formas distintas de vida pública: la forma de un nuevo liberalismo y la forma que, con un nombre impropio, se suele llamar totalitaria. Los pueblos menores adoptarán figuras de transición e intermediarias. Esto salvará Europa. Una vez más, resultará patente que toda forma de vida ha de menester de su antagonista. El “totalitarismo” salvará al “liberalismo”, destiñendo sobre él, depurándolo, y gracias a ello veremos pronto un nuevo liberalismo templar los regímenes autoritarios”] (La rebelión de las masas 64, 293). For Ortega’s position regarding his return to Franco’s Spain, see Morán, El maestro en el erial: Ortega y Gasset y la cultura del Franco.

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think about it, this means a lot against our meditations and in favor of our duty to review them and to throw not only a few into the useless paper basket. [Y acaso sea frívola la posición del filósofo cuando piensa que la guerra es una impertinencia que viene por sorpresa a perturbar el ritmo de sus meditaciones. Porque la guerra la hemos hecho todos y es justo que todos la padezcamos; es un momento de la gran polémica que constituye nuestra vida social; nadie con mediana consciencia puede creerse totalmente irresponsable. Y si la guerra nos aparece como una sorpresa en el ámbito de nuestras meditaciones, si ella nos coge totalmente desprevenidos de categorías para pensarla, esto quiere decir mucho en contra de nuestras meditaciones y en pro de nuestro deber de revisarlas y de arrojar no pocas al cesto de los papeles (sic) inservibles.] (Machado 201, 261)

The poet and critic and, at that time, literary editor of The New Republic, Malcolm Cowley, the reputed liberal magazine —in the 1812 Cádiz etymological meaning of defender of freedoms but contrary to economic laissez faire— published in the United States capital, was also keen to the dilemma between political commitment and poetic quality affecting the canon in the new continent: all issues so important for Jiménez. Upon reviewing a popular anthology of exiled European writers, Heart of Europe, Cowley wavered over the potential alternatives or embarras du choix: “If Schmidt is included in their book, then Brown must be left out it —and what about Müller, who doesn’t write very well, but still he’s a capital fellow, with the right opinions?” (“Europe in exile” 121). Confronted with these puzzling crossroads, the followers of the New Criticism Immanent School in the United States used Allen Tate’s The Sewanee Review as one of their main publishing sources.5 This journal defended the values of a devout, poetically-religious urn with the Imagist movement as a model,

5 During those years, The Sewanee Review published essential contributions to New Criticism such as Joseph Frank’s “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” (1945); T.S. Eliot’s “GAT is Minor Poetry” (1946); and W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley’s “The Intentional Fallacy” (1946).

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Matthew Arnold and T.S. Eliot as their gurus, and the canonic tradition as their standard (Eagleton 46-47). In the Southern United States, this gave way to a process similar to the alienation suffered by the landowner writers for the Hispanic Modernism. Consequently, when facing the extinction of a traditional way of life displaced by the industrial revolution, New Criticism looked to deify a certain timehonored spirituality.6 During the years of World War II, poets like Robert Frost were redeemed, on the one hand, within the Immanent horizon, in search of a tradition that would honor an idyllically optimist past, but also by the demagogues distant from the cultural market, since poets like Frost could be refitted in the essence of an opportunistic nationalism. Malcolm Cowley was critical of these non-literary hierarchies, since the popularity of the four-times Pulitzer laureate poet did owe much more to a transcendent reading of his texts than to the internal tension found in his verses. However, when he examined the immanent values of nature in Frost’s poems, he found that the poet, fearful of abandoning the forest, never dared to contemplate the trees, to delve into the images, for which Cowley criticized Frost as being lyrically superficial: a postcard print. Cowley rebuked what Juan Ramón, in his intimate notes in Alerta [Alert],7 had admired in Frost: the preci-

6 7

For another discussion on the relations of Hispanism and New Criticism, see Resina. Alerta was one of the intellectual projects that brought Juan Ramón and his spouse Zenobia Camprubí to Washington in 1942, along with recordings later performed for the Library of Congress Archive of Hispanic Literature on Tape (Camprubí, Correspondencia 1 350). The Office of the Coordinator for American Affairs in Washington asked Juan Ramón to write a series of radio literary chronicles in order to promote cooperation and goodwill toward the Allied cause in Spanish-speaking America. Despite having written a number of them following his ideas on Modernism spanning from San Juan de la Cruz, Bécquer and Darío through Poe, Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Frost, T. S. Eliot or James Joyce, the future Nobel Laureate eventually dropped the offer in view of the military censorship, and because he ended up seeing the project as “Inter-American political propaganda” [“propaganda política interamericana”] (Alerta 11). In that sense, Juan Ramón was opposed to Pan-Americanism prevalent in United States

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sion of his words. “Frost is one of those few sentimental geographers that place one’s heart in his / her true and sure country, and later during a trip one encounters that same heart. Man, the countryside, the animal, the flower, everything, after the first word, is present and exact” [“Es Frost uno de esos pocos geógrafos sentimentales que le ponen a uno el corazón en un país verdadero y seguro, que luego, en un viaje, encuentra el corazón así. El hombre, el campo, el animal, la flor, todo, tras la primera palabra, está presente y exacto”] (135).8 On the other hand, with the progressive spirit of a Liberal Northerner, Cowley affirmed that Frost, rooted in an outmoded tradition, was a reactionary who was deaf to change. But using concepts similar to Juan Ramón’s “Límite del progreso” [“Limit of progress”] —“If we dedicate our progress to greatness, we shall always be free, because greatness may always progress indefinitely without slaving us” [“Si dedicamos nuestro progreso a lo grande, seremos libres siempre, porque lo grande puede progresar indefinidamente sin esclavizarnos”] (Guerra en España 127), the North American critic also defended the “ingenious progress” found in the innovations of art, ethics, the sciences, industry or politics (“The case Against Mr. Frost: II” 345). Furthermore, upon examining the lack of force in Frost, he matched the admiration that the poet from Moguer felt towards Whitman, because, like a true aristocrat, “he spoke full of everyone’s general tone” [“hablaba lleno en el tono general de todos”] (Alerta 132). Nevertheless, without forgetting the central principles of the new southern criticism, Cowley established himself, as if he were paraphrasing Jiménez’s terminology, settling less for just ethics

8

Hispanism as a narrow concept that excluded Spain and had contributed to the Non-Intervention policy during the Spanish Civil War. One must remember that Jiménez had come to the United States in 1936 as a goodwill ambassador for the Spanish Republic, in order to change public opinion about the arms embargo (Guerra en España 124-132). Jiménez gave a talk on modernism at the Library of Congress in front of an assembly of the Librarians of the Americas, on May 17, 1947 (“Spanish Writer Juan Ramón Jiménez Reading from his Prose Lecture on Modernism”.) For the relations between Jiménez and Frost, see Young.

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than for frank aesthetics, and, in line with Whitman, breaking away from those poet-professors of the New Criticism school, that according to Juan Ramón, were [a] “plague as rampant here as in all other countries” [“plaga tan general aquí como en todos los países”] (Alerta 133). A first glance at Jiménez’s poetry during this time, the unpublished book Una colina meridiana [A Meridian Hill] (1942-1950), seems to present the poles of ethical and aesthetic ambivalences discussed by Malcolm Cowley. This volume offers Juan Ramon’s inner vision of beauty, close to New Criticism aesthetics and exemplified by his use of color like poets Salvador Rueda, Manuel Reina and Frost. If En el otro costado [On the other Coast] and Tiempo [Time], Jiménez present texts marked by the negative circumstances of exile during his years of residence in Florida (1939-1942), Una colina meridiana [A Meridian Hill] appears to deviate from this path and proceeds without detectable aporias towards the immanence of Dios deseante y deseado [God Desired and Desiring].9 The poems are rooted in the horizons Jiménez contemplated from the residential Meridian Park in Washington D.C. across from the couple’s dwelling at Dorchester House 2480 16th Street, a new-style European park built in 1940: “J.R. pleaded with me to go with him to Meridian Park” (August 13, 1944) [. . .] “later, we sat in Meridian Park” (June 23 1945) [“J.R. me rogó que fuera con él al parque Meridian” (. . .) “más tarde nos sentamos en el parque Meridian”] (Camprubí, Diario 2 244, 299).10 This new vantage point reminded him of the Madrid Student Residence 9

We should compare the synchronic point of view of the selected poems in Tercera antología poética, where key exile texts were removed, to a diachronic exile editing in Poesías escojidas. 10 The 16th Street and Columbia Road neighborhood was an affluent residential area during the 1940s. It eventually fell out of favor as City living was demised for the Maryland and Virginia suburbs. The idyllic space that Juan Ramón Jiménez contemplated between 1942 and 1947 became for some time the decrepit Malcom X Park, abandoned to the hard core exchanges of drug dealers. City dwellers have returned to it in the past decades, particularly thanks to the prime mortgage speculatory and unregulated neo-Friedman investments that put the international financial system in 2008 on the brink of collapse. O tempora! O mores! See photographs.

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Meridian Park, 16th Street, NW, Washington D.C.

The Jiménez’s residence (1942-1947). Dorchester House, 2480 16th Street, NW, Washington D.C. 20009.

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Colina de los Chopos [Hill of Poplars]. The kaleidoscope of golden hues during the afternoons in the forests of Maryland, that Juan Ramón enjoyed close to the house in Riverdale where he resided from 1947 to 1951 and that he painted in Los olmos de Riverdale [The Riverdale Elms], one of the volumes included in Una colina meridiana, also brought him back to the Retiro Park in Madrid. These verses are marked by the resounding solitude (la soledad sonora) of words “illuminated” [. . .] “gleaming” [. . .] “fiery” / a distinct expression, that in the sun is screaming / silently” [allowing his] “distinct” [voice to convene] “to the shores of life” [“iluminada” (. . .) fuljidente (. . .) fogueante (. . .) / una expresión distinta, que en el sol está gritando / silenciosa” (305) (. . .) “distinto” (317) “en las orillas de la vida” (312)] (Poesías últimas escojidas). However, faced with this modern conscience protected by the shield of his poems, searching for the poet’s perfect and circular Obra, in some texts it is impossible to avoid the subject’s dissemination phantom, the reverberating howl à la Whitman, the postmodern insecurity of the poem open to the other(s)’ schizosemia (Villar, Wilcox, Self and image). These texts posit exiled voices of alterity, that according to Sánchez Romeralo, present a subject not “inebriated, infinite, content composer of names” but rather the “aged, exiled and insecure” one [“embriagado, inagotable, feliz nombrador” (. . .) “viejo desterrado, inseguro”] (Poesías últimas escojidas 35). It is a subject entangled again in unsolvable contradictions within the pessimism of dialogism close to the unfamiliar voices present in Espacio [Space], where a second “I” may not be tamed and silenced: Within me now there is one speaking, speaking, speaking now. I cannot silence it, it cannot silence itself. I wish to be at peace with this afternoon, this afternoon of mad creation (it does not allow me to silence it, I do not let it to be silent). I wish for silence in my silence, and I am not about to silence it, nor does it know how to silence itself. Be silent, my second self, for you speak as I do and you do not speak as I do; be silent, I curse you! It is like that wind with the wave; the wave that sinks with the immense wave; the wave that climbs immensely with the wind; and what pain of smells and sounds, what pain of colors, pain of touch, of taste of space and the abyss!

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[Dentro de mí hay uno que está hablando, hablando, hablando ahora. No lo puedo callar, no se puede callar. Yo quiero estar tranquilo por la tarde, esta tarde de loca creación, (no se deja callar, no lo dejo callar). Quiero el silencio en mi silencio, y no lo sé callar a éste, ni se sabe callar. ¡Calla, segundo yo, que hablas como yo y que no hablas como yo; calla, maldito! Es como el viento ese con la ola; el viento que se hunde con la ola inmensa, ola que sube inmensa con el viento: ¡y qué dolor de olor y de sonido, qué dolor de color, y qué dolor de toque, de sabor de ámbito de abismo.] (275)

In the section “Del bajo Takoma” [“From Lower Takoma”] in Una colina meridiana [A Meridian Hill], whose epithet also alludes to Jimenez’ depressions and internment in the Seventh Day Adventist Sanatorium in Takoma Park, we find the “Coplas de los tres perdedores” [“Stanzas of the Three Losers”] that allude to this similar indetermination displayed earlier in Espacio [Space]. The poetic subjects present themselves in a symptomatic disorder. The first subject, separated from his shadow, is therefore unable to fuse with himself, and precedes the third subject, always leaning towards death: “I. And death”. Meanwhile, the second subject who “is a stranger [. . .] on this strange hillside / which does not end”, feels as if he were another: “I leave(s) this life / through an unknown endless land”, lost as in a temporal paradox of intertextual exiles alluding both to Poe and Antonio Machado: “Never is my today” [“Yo. Y la muerte (. . .) yo estraño estoy (. . .) en esta estraña ladera (. . .) salgo de esta vida / con tierra desconocida / que no acaba (. . .) nunca es mi hoy”] (317). These poems face the unspeakable cora (Kristeva) dangling through the spaces of time in exile exemplified in another poem: “Octubre más extraño” [“Stranger October”] “(Dupont Circle and Society Hill)” (303-304). Here the ambiguous signs remain opaque as they weave a heteroglossia of multiple, uncontrollable voices for the modern subject, [who is] confused “among the vague infinite voices / the thousand tongues alike from far” [“entre las vagas voces infinitas / las mil lenguas desde lejos parecidas”] (304). The enunciator’s abundant signs boasting about himself in “Domingo de primavera” [“Spring Sunday”] (La soledad sonora [The Sounding Solitude] 1908), “full of grace [. . .] filled the soul with the pure aristocracy of the fountain, the bird,

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the light and the roses” [“el colmado de gracia (. . .) henchida el alma de la pura aristocracia de la fuente, del pájaro, de la luz, de las rosas”] (Segunda antología poética 85), are now diffused intertextually in the ungraspable memory of a fleeting image: “an illusion of the statue that already was / and is water now”; [“una ilusión de estatua que ya fue / y que es el agua, ahora”] (Poesías últimas escojidas 304). To sing through verses no longer guarantees eternity as in La realidad invisible, and life beyond “the pure breeze, / belonging to the last bird, / the one from darkness’ golden heights” [“la pura brisa, / la del pájaro último, / la de las cimas de oro de lo oscuro!”] (90) has been contaminated by the inauthentic (Heidegger) others’ existence. The subject’s dwelling sways to the strangeness of “a silence without sense”, incapable of seizing what surrounds him, with his “strange life more than ever among lives / and life” [“un silencio sin sentido” (. . .) “vida estraña más que nunca entre las vidas / y la vida”] (304). Such deep negativity reveals that during those years, Jiménez could not let go of the pain and isolation which, in exile, USA culture was imposing on him. Incapable of reconciling both vantages for his poetical creation, he fluctuated back and forth between the imaginary state of his poems in order to reduce the duality of the mirror stage (Lacan), attempting to distance himself from the deconstructive dangers of other discourses, and / or lamenting himself in front of the vestiges of specular symbolization, once dialogism has been established. However, from examples in Alerta [Alert], the years teaching at the University of Maryland (1943-1951) and the contacts with Duke University (1942, 1947), we know that Jiménez remained active when facing otherness. Of course, such activities represented, up to a certain point, useless extensions of his condition as an intellectual in exile. Either they fell short of his areas of immediate poetic contact, Latin America in the case of the project in Alerta [Alert], or, like with his classes at the university, they were directed toward minorities estranged from the poets’ epistemology. These activities created other trompe l’oeils, since according to commentaries by Zenobia, the majority of students found themselves unable to comprehend Jiménez’s aesthetic principles and knowledge. Therefore Juan Ramón mono-

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logued in his classes.11 On top of it, none of these activities solved the problem of the lack of communication with his closest potential readers: the North American public. The real challenge was trying to reverse these readers’ horizon of expectations. But such breakthrough can’t be corroborated when we examine Juan Ramon’s English publications during his stay in the Washington D.C. area. No book came out of the presses and only one poem appeared in translation, “El otoñado”, printed as “A voice in October” by The Quarterly Review of Literature in 1945 (Campoamor 46-50). Nevertheless, he attempted several times to reach his North American readers.12 He maintained sporadic but intense epistolary exchanges between the Spring of 1944 and 1946 with USA correspondents connected with the literary world in the most influential publications of the time. As we shall see, such disparity between the poet’s activity and the lack of demand from publishing houses and journals is explained by the many adverse circumstances that left these project unfinished. First, one must to take into account that the spread of Spanish literature in the USA was scarce within English-speaking circles. At the same time, Juan Ramón suffered there from canonical manipulation, as a consequence of the extension in exile of the literary war with his disciples during the controversial 1920s and 30s. Therefore, Contemporary Spanish Poetry edited by Eleanor Turnbull, under Pedro Sali-

11 See Naharro-Calderón “Los descentrados” 30. “The biggest disappointment yesterday was to feel that J.R. spoke above the reach of almost all the female teachers present, not only because of their lack of knowledge of Spanish literature but because they could not understand either his varied vocabulary or his Spanish accent” [La desilusión más grande de ayer fue sentir que J.R. hablaba fuera del alcance de casi todas las profesoras presentes, no solamente por su falta de conocimiento de la literatura española, sino, en particular, porque no podían entender su vocabulario ni su pronunciación española”] Apr. 2, 1939 (Camprubí, Diario 2 41). 12 My gratitude to Raquel Sárraga, former director of the Sala Zenobia and Juan Ramón Jiménez [SZ&JRJ] (University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras) for her unvaluable help in locating some of this “Correspondence from / to Juan Ramón Jiménez” and to the Pinzón-Jiménez family for their copyright authorization.

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nas’s patronage, excluded the three poetic precursors, Unamuno, Antonio Machado and Jiménez, in favor of a modern poetic beginning with José Moreno Villa.13 On the other hand, a glance at anthologies of Spanish literature in the USA reveals their limited choices, or the mythic-folk vision through the topical Spain of charanga and pandereta [street band and tambourine] presented to the North American public mainly through Alberti or García Lorca’s poetry, amplified by the Granada-born writer’s commercial melodrama and martyrdom.14 One of the most USA informed writers, William Carlos Williams, upon analyzing Lorca, focused his vision upon Góngora as his guiding northern star (Selected Essays 224-225), while Federico’s death was explained as a heroic one in defense of the literary cause (229) Clearly, few critics were prepared to receive those books impartially. In The Sewanee Review, Robert Lowell could only compare the translation of Alberti’s poetry with The Four Quartets by Eliot (54 [1946] 150-151). Consequently, Juan Ramón took good note of W. R. Moses’s comments to Alberti and Neruda’s translations (Accent 5.3 1945, 190). As a cofounder of this journal at the University of Illinois-Urbana,15 Moses compared poems structured internally and those lacking editing, like the former written on the altar of circumstances. Using a standard New Criticism argument, writing poetry was “the desire to know, control, perpetuate, celebrate”(190), where ideas would never subordinate form, and “a reader usually can most quickly ‘spot’ the work of a good poet by the freshness, force appropriateness, and location of the images it contains” (190). Consequently, Moses was interweaving segments of prevalent Jiménez aesthetics. Jiménez affirmed that “poetry (was) [a] cultivated instinct” [“poesía (era) instinto cultivado”] (Anthropos 11, 110), the poet should “be silent in times of

13 See Salinas / Guillén. 14 Due to the profusion of editions, Lorca stood out as the sought-out poet by the publishers and the public. Meanwhile, most Hispanists in university circles in the United States stood clear of taking sides during the Spanish Civil War. For the Spanish cultural craze, see Kagan. 15 Accent later would publish poems by Neruda (7,1 (1946) 48-50) and García Lorca (8,1 (1948) 115-116).

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war” [“callar en la guerra” (supra)] or that “in poetry the word must be so precise that it will be forgotten by the reader and only the idea shall remain; something like a river that doesn’t make one think of water, but that it’s flowing” [“en poesía la palabra debe ser tan justa que se olvide el lector de ella y sólo quede la idea; algo así como un río que no hiciera pensar en que lleva agua, sino en que es corriente”] (Anthropos 11, 109). On the other hand, Moses, when criticizing Neruda for presenting “the materials of poetry, say, two-thirds processed” (109), corroborated Jiménez’s caricature (1939) from Españoles de tres mundos [Spaniards from Three Worlds]. According to Juan Ramón, the Chilean was “a great poet of disorganization; the talented poet that doesn’t fully understand nor employ his natural skills” [“un gran poeta de la desorganización; el poeta dotado que no acaba de comprender ni emplear sus dotes naturales”] (Guerra en España 253). When reading in Accent ideas from his aphorisms, —“I don’t tolerate condescendence, and I demand justice” [“no tolero condescendencia y exijo justicia”] (Anthropos 11, 110), Juan Ramón congratulated Moses using the following terms: When I see something I like, I am in the habit of congratulating its author. It seems impossible to me to write in such few lines a more exact criticism of the two little books you have written about. And since you are not Spanish, this is twice as important. That is the honest form of criticism: to point out the best and worst. If we all did as you do we would avoid those fatal later falls of poets, for example, stupidly exalted in excess by friendly critics or sectarians devoid of dignity and conscience. [Cuando veo algo que me gusta, tengo el hábito de felicitar a su autor. Me parece imposible escribir en tan pocas líneas una crítica más exacta de dos pequeños libros que la que Ud. ha hecho. Y como Ud. no es español, esto es dos veces más importante. Esta es la forma honesta de hacer crítica: señalar lo mejor y lo peor. Si todos hiciéramos como Ud. evitaríamos estas fatales caídas ulteriores de los poetas, por ejemplo, estúpidamente exaltados en exceso por críticos amigos o sectarios desprovistos de dignidad y conciencia.] (June 29, 1945 J-1 / 135 (1) / 99, SZ&JRJ)

And he denounced sectarianism in a letter, six days later, on July 5, 1945, to Theodore Weiss, editor of The Quarterly Review of literature,

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whose coeditor, Warren Carrier, had met Jiménez at Duke, in 1942 (J-1 / 135 (1) 102-104, SZ&JRJ). The issue up for discussion was that of Ángel Flores, a translator of Neruda (Residence on Earth and Other Poems), and an anthologist for the Spanish section in Heart of Europe (127-128). Flores posited 20th-century poetic modernity starting with Guillén’s in La Revista de Occidente, and among the group called the Exiled, he referred to Ortega, Unamuno and Baroja mixed in with Gabriel Miró, Gómez de la Serna and García Lorca. Juan Ramón became exasperated when facing these specialists’ provincialism and took a stand via Angel Flores (Azam, “Concepto y praxis” 365) against the Communist aesthetics of Neruda, while separating writing from praxis, and opposing himself to social realism (Villar 19-20): There is much good among our contemporaries (from Unamuno to those yet unpublished) which is not even quoted. Many critics and editors look for poetic value in what is sectarian: communism, for example. I sympathize greatly with some of the economic aspects of communism, but I don’t believe it adds any value to a writer as a certain HispanoAmerican translator pretends who, deprived of any rudiment of conscience, as a clear sectarian, goes around boasting, sticking his finger in every pie. [Existe mucha poesía de buena calidad entre nuestros contemporáneos (de Unamuno a aquéllos todavía ni publicados) que ni se cita. Muchos críticos y editores buscan el valor poético en lo que es sectario: el comunismo, por ejemplo. Siento grandes simpatías hacia ciertos de los aspectos económicos del comunismo, pero no creo que el hecho de ser comunista añada valor alguno a un escritor, como pretende cierto traductor hispanoamericano, el cual, desprovisto de cualquier rudimento de la conciencia, un sectario evidente, jalea por ahí, metiendo las narices donde no le llaman.]

Besides, Jiménez’ contacts with the most important poetry publications in English were not only informative, as stated by a letter from June 24, 1945 to Allen Tate, The Sewanee Review editor (J-1 / 135 / (1) / 97, SZ&JRJ). He declared that his literature knowledge was extensive, but he was growing tired of seeing it a debtor of European

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movements. He asked Tate for news about the revistas heroicas [heroic journals], in order to continue following the younger movements. However, Tate only managed to provide him with a list that we could consider canonical: Accent, Arizona Quarterly, New Mexico Quarterly, Southwest, Review, Rocky Mountain Review, American Prefaces. Therefore, Juan Ramón’s USA exile didn’t slow down, as stated in his aphorism prior to the war, his desire to “encourage the young” and his support for heroic journals shone through The Quarterly Review of Literature. The contact established with Warren Carrier, during the Duke 1942 Summer seminars, encouraged that correspondence, and the young editor (Mar. 8, 1946, SZ&JRJ) requested from Juan Ramón a poem for his publication, because he considered him “the best representative of the lyric in the contemporary world.” Juan Ramon responded, not only by offering Carrier “El otoñado”[“A Voice in October”], but also the chance to publish “En casas de Poe” [“At home with Poe”] from the Alerta [Alert] series. As for his unconditional support for the journal, Issue no. 4 from 1945 displayed him as a patron. The opportunity of providing in English parts of the Alerta series was also discussed when Joseph Frank learned of it, and The Sewanee Review became interested, hoping for Frank to translate some of the articles in the series (The Sewanee Review to Joseph Frank to be forwarded to Jiménez May 2, 1946, SZ&JRJ). But as for the original project, Juan Ramón argued that the Alerta’s organic corpus demanded a book format, although he offered his article on Poe, coined as an “intellectual romanticist (sic) and Symbolist.” Nevertheless, the project didn’t have any continuity. With “El otoñado” [“A Voice in October”], Jiménez chose to publish a poem from his second “modern” period, rather than the innovative possibilities explored in Espacio [Space]. Somehow this choice could have reflected not only a canonical affinity to the New Criticism trends, but also his inauthentic attempt to set foot on USA poetic shores while confronted with the ethical and aesthetic insecurity of exile. As the recently vanished Jiménez’s disciple and Literature Nobel Award proponent, my dear colleague and friend Graciela Palau-Nemes stated, “having acquired full conscience of his skills [Jiménez] wrote, perhaps, the most narcissistic poem in Hispanic literature” [“habien-

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do adquirido conciencia plena de sus dotes (Jiménez) escribió el poema más narcisista quizá de la literatura hispánica”] (173). Paradoxically, he was presenting himself to North American readers within the orthodoxy of the New Criticism, but removing himself from possible contacts with other experimentalist poets with heroic tendencies like the ones presented in The Quarterly Review of Literature. The Hispanic affinity of Carrier, who was familiar with Spanish and Jiménez’s lessons, also facilitated the publishing of two sonnets by José María Heredia and a short story by Ramón J. Sender in The Quarterly Review of Literature (Winter 1944).16 Later on, Carrier would apologize for the mistaken expression of foremost that his coeditor, Theodore Weiss, had attributed to both writers (“Principales” Apr. 14, 1944, SZ&JRJ). In a subsequent letter he announced an issue dedicated to European literature, where Juan Ramón’s poem was supposed to be published. However, in the 1944 Fall issue (2 2), that included a poem from San Juan’s La noche oscura del alma [Dark Night of the Soul], and Surrealist texts by Alberti, Jiménez’s text wasn’t printed because the editors rejected the translation of “El otoñado” [“A Voice in October”]. Jiménez wrote to the new editor of The Quarterly, Theodore Weiss, who had replaced Carrier, and he stated annoyedly his desire to remove the poem (June 24, 1945, SZ&JRJ). He also reminded Weiss that he had not asked to be included in the journal and that his unselfish collaboration as a guest deserved a distinguished place, just as he had performed it in his own journals. Weiss’ reply clarified that misunderstanding and foreshadowed the publication of the poem next to William Carlos Williams, “frequently regarded [as] one of the first of modern USA poets” (Undated, SZ&JRJ). Such commentary caused an aesthetic response by Juan Ramón, and a new reply by Weiss, as the best example of Jiménez’s dialogue within the young American poetic circle of the time (July 5, 1945, SZ&JRJ). Juan Ramón displayed, as usual, his precise and embracing vision of Western and USA literature, and alluded to some

16 “The Conquerors” and “The Trebbia”, and “Tale from the Pyrenees” (75 and 119-124).

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possible intertextualities. He evoked accurately William Carlos Williams’ debuts in the creationist magazine The Dial, published between 1880 and 1929, and how in 1920 he had uncovered some verses by the physician and poet. Reiterating his thesis from Alerta [Alert], he pleaded with the young talent in the United States to abandon the outdated Surrealist fashions coming from Europe, especially present through the New Directions label. He contended that it was spreading chaos, as in the case of the publication of a gigantic anthology of Latin American poetry, in which, Jiménez loathed ironically most of the authors selected, as friends and relatives of the compilers: “only one third of the poets […] should have been in it.” He also criticized Weiss for his provincialism and for putting such a “writer of verse” as Stefan George next to St John of the Cross. The ongoing correspondence (July 13, 1945) of Weiss, who had listened to Juan Ramón without understanding a word during one of his lectures in Miami,17 suggested the open and renewed character of the journal. Born in Reading (Pennsylvania), the home of Wallace Stevens, he defended genuine poets like the insurance broker or Williams, and ironically asked Jiménez if those voices had been able to assimilate the European trends without becoming second-rate French poets who wrote in a foreign language. Wallace Stevens was indeed familiar with the Spanish tradition and an epistemology (“The Irrational Element in Poetry”, 1937) whose concept of imagination in order to structure poetry could be compared to Juan Ramon’s Intelijencia [Intelligence].18 Furthermore, Stevens’s Ideas of Order (1936) could be presented as the poetic rebellion of a young man facing a tradition of precursors such as Jiménez (Bloom), and breaking the circle of the canonic curse by T. S. Eliot. Likewise, William Carlos Williams was close in Spring and Fall (1923) to Jiménez’s formats in Diario de un poeta recién casado [Diary of a Newlywed Poet] (1916), or to the poetry / prose dichotomy that would later obsess Juan Ramón in the latter period of Leyenda [Legend]. But Weiss’ letter didn’t receive a reply.

17 An interesting Jiménez’s example for the birth of poetry through silence. 18 Wallace Stevens was published in Orígenes by Rodríguez Feo (Stevens 1970).

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Was Juan Ramón’s silence covering up a new project, or was he hiding away from a strong case of reverse influence or Bloom’s apophrades? The revision of the ambivalences in Juan Ramon’s poems and their reception in the United States during these years confirm the schizophrenia that pursued the final Obra stages, always being relived, endlessly in search of totality, split by a sort of Derridean difference. It also inscribed Jiménez in the orthodoxy of the poetics of the southern New Criticism, but also separated him from this trend because of his vindication of Whitman and a heroic youth. In fact, as an independent actor in USA academic institutions (Duke, Maryland) —he sometimes referred to university faculty as especialistillos [clever specialists]— he was also opening, with Alerta [Alert], the way to an engagé and overall poetical, critical and political view which would encompass the traditions of Spain and Latin America through his Modernismo theory, breaking away from the prevalent and neutral Pan-Americanism present in Spanish university circles in the United States, removed from the Spanish Civil War conflict. Juan Ramón continued to be attentive to the changes in North American poetry, its influences in Spain and the selection of journals, but he was distrustful of dialoguing with the Avant-gardes. Finally, one realizes that, if Juan Ramón had the chance to reach the North American public through key publications, he never really seized the day as a way of alleviating his cultural exile. If he stayed away from USA poetry journals and magazines, paradoxically —one mustn’t forget he had defended the poet’s right to silence during the war, while remaining active and critical socially— his only steady attempt to publish in English did not concern poetry but poetical politics: “Wallace el mejor” [“Wallace the Best”] from Alerta [Alert]. Nevertheless, he failed again to publish it in Malcolm Cowley’s The New Republic (Letter to Malcolm Cowley, May 1944, SZ&JRJ).19 If on the one hand, the English language barrier were to impede it —the translation (Zenobia’s?) didn’t flow well in English—

19 Henry Wallace would eventually become the editor of The New Republic (1946-1948).

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Juan Ramón’s article also arrived late on the scene.20 Juan Ramón and Zenobia’s neighbor and friend, Henry Agard Wallace (1888-1965), an independent politician left of the Democratic Party, former Secretary of Agriculture (1933-1940), and planner of socialist green cooperatives like Greenbelt (Maryland), Vice President with Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1941-1945), Secretary of Commerce (1945-1946) under Roosevelt’s last turn in office, and the beginning of Truman’s, and presidential candidate for the Progressive Party in the 1948 election, had his political fate already sealed. In August 1944, during the Democratic Convention in Chicago, he would be sacrificed as Roosevelt’s running mate by the political machinery in favor of the moderate Harry Truman. Wallace’s sidestepping by the party bosses meant closing down a remarkable space for dialogue after Roosevelt’s passing away in April 1945, a potentially cordial opening during the Post War, as well as a different outcome for Franco’s dictatorship.21

20 Published in Cuadernos Americanos 17, 4 (1944), it was reprinted in Spain without Jiménez’s authorization in El Español (February 3, 1945), an official publication with no connection to the one launched in 19th-century England by the exile José María Blanco White. The 1945 publication was controlled by Juan Aparicio, Franco’s General Press Director, and it sparked a furious reply from a Phalangist reviewer on February 7, 1945 (Guerra en España 264-265). See Naharro-Calderón Entre el exilio y el interior, 226-247. Both items reached the Jiménez’s through Wallace (Camprubí, Epistolario 1 440). 21 Zenobia had first met the Vice President on December 20, 1942 at a friend’s luncheon: “Last Sunday I went alone, due to J.R.’s illness, to a lunch that a friend gave us to meet the Vice President, a very kind, serious, simple person. He asked me with all affection about Spain and I told him that there was only one thing on which all Spaniards agreed, but on that we agreed with all our hearts, i.e. in wishing peace” [“El domingo pasado fui sola, por la enfermedad de J.R., a un almuerzo que nos dió una amiga para conocer al vicepresidente, persona amabilísima, seria, sencilla. Me preguntó con todo cariño por España y yo le dije que no había más que una sola cosa en la que todos los españoles estuviéramos de acuerdo, pero en esa estábamos de acuerdo con toda el alma, y era en desear la paz”] (365). She later certified, through Juan Guerrero Ruiz’s correspondence, how close they had become with the Wallaces, when referring to their frequent reciprocal visits, and pointed out that his world view politics had some very potent enemies, as of October 20, 1946: “And by the way, what a false campaign

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Henry Wallace, close to Buddhist theosophy through a former Russian guru from whom he had to disassociated himself in order not to endanger his 1948 running chances, prone to a peaceful, multilateral Foreign and Commercial policy both with Latin America and the Soviet Union, advocated in that presidential race, where he received over 1,000,000 votes, an end to segregation, full voting rights for Blacks, a universal government health insurance, and stable labor relations controlled by trade unions favorable to worker’s rights, at a time of intense antilabor policies. In order to discredit his campaign, Wallace was publicly charged with being close to the Communists, while he had predicted in The New Republic (1947) that the Century of the Common Man would turn into the Century of Fear under the Truman Doctrine. Juan Ramón defended Wallace’s positions in a note to Victoria Ocampo, the editor of Sur, the most influential publication in Latin America (Guerra en España 265-266).22 But betting on Wallace also meant, for Jiménez, jumping ahead of history. In Wallace’s persona and discourse, Jiménez saw his ethical assumptions (El trabajo gustoso [The enjoyable task]) coming to light, for “the politician, who has administered a country, and a town, must be impregnated fully with poetry that means peace for his nation” [“el político, que ha administrado un país, un pueblo, debe estar impregnado de la poesía profunda que sería la paz de su patria”] (Política poética 32). And spreading a pro-Wallace message, during his trip to Buenos Aires and Montevideo, just like a politician-poet à la Shelley, was a new visionary gesture on Juan Ramón’s part. When Wallace

part of the press is carrying out, attributing a point of view very far from his” [“Y dicho sea de paso, qué campaña tan falsa le está hacienda parte de la prensa, atribuyéndole un punto de vista lejanísimo del suyo”] (559). 22 Ahead of Georges Mc Govern, the Democratic candidate in the 1972 election, Wallace was a precursor (Bloom) blessed by Juan Ramón’s poetical politics, and opening the way to Barak Obama’s presidential victories as a hopeful sign for overcoming some of the American Civil War (1861-1865) cleavages (NaharroCalderón “La nit que van prendre Dixie” [“The Night they Brough Old Dixie Down”]) later blown up by his unnamable successor at the presidency (NaharroCalderón “El ‘Trumpazo’ y la náusea” [“Nausea and the Trumpist Effect”].

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declared that “only through religion and education can the freedomloving individual realize that his greatest private pleasure comes from serving the highest unity, the general welfare of all” (The century of the Common Man 73), Juan Ramón was seeing in him the genuine aristocrat, “conscious of his being, [without] hiding in front of his people, [without] being disrespectful to his people” [“consciente de su ser y su estar, (sin) disfrazarse ante su pueblo, (sin) faltarle al respeto a su pueblo”] (Política poética 65). Wallace was the American institutional reincarnation of political-poets like Francisco Giner de los Ríos, whose mystical search pointed towards the unity of the Krausist God (Azam, La obra de Juan Ramón Jiménez). Like the regeneracionista [regenerationist] Joaquín Costa, “another social poetical man without verses spoke of ‘school and pantry’”, Henry A. Wallace reiterated “religion, culture, and agriculture” [“Joaquín Costa, otro hombre social poético sin verso, dijo ‘escuela y despensa’ [. . .] relijión, cultivo, y agricultura”] (Guerra en España 264).23 In 1944, Wallace defended the colonial independence for the Third World, the search for stability between North and South, and the coexistence between East and West, or Juan Ramón’s “mi comunismo individualista” [“my individualist communism”], which sought a fusion between Communism and Democracy within a universal federation of well-being (Alerta 162). In those years, Wallace articulated an ethical-aesthetic project Juan Ramón immediately felt drawn to. On November 8, 1942, Wallace declared that “Russia and the United States have had a profound effect upon each other. Both are striving for the education, the productivity and the enduring happiness of the common man. The new democracy, the democracy of the common man, includes not only the Bill of Rights, but also economic democracy, ethnic democracy, educational democracy, 23 In El modernismo, Juan Ramón also talked about his Washington neighbor: “[Henry] Wallace (who knows Saint John of the Cross, Saint Theresa, etc. By heart). The Pacific era is coming. Also from America [not divided] North and South [but] East and West) [(Henry) Wallace (quién sabe de memoria San Juan de la Cruz, Santa Teresa, etc.). Viene la era del Pacífico. También de América no (dividida en) Norte y Sur sino (en) Este y Oeste”] (181).

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and democracy in the treatment of the sexes” (The Century of the Common Man 36). And on March 8, 1943, he added: “The future well-being of the world depends upon the extent to which Marxism, as it is being progressively modified in Russia, and democracy, as we are adapting it to 20th-century conditions, can live together in peace” (79).24 Juan Ramón’s aristocratic stance [aristocracia de intemperie] and enjoyable task [trabajo gustoso] found his ethical executor in Wallace, through the common man’s polyphony in political and economic discourses that the United Nations could have established as their motto. During Wallace’s earlier 1943 goodwill trip through Latin America, where he gained popular fervor for his modesty and his ability to address his audiences in Spanish, this progressive politician succeeded in having several countries later declare war against the Axis (Ecuador, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, Venezuela), and in addition, the trip significantly improved the commercial relations, forcing Latin American producers, in relation to the Board of Economic Warfare (WEB), to pay fair wages and provide adequate labor costs, while guaranteeing that the United States would pay for half of those, which angered the Secretariat of Commerce in Washington. That trip also coincided with Vicente Lombardo Toledano’s tour, as Secretary of the Confederation of Latin American Workers (CTAL) which was seven million workers strong. Coincidentally, it was weakened, in 1948, by the creation of the World Confederation of the Free Trade Union (CMSL), funded by the CIA. The Wallace tour represented the extension in Latin America of the New Deal policies that the progressive USA Secretary of Labor (1933-45), Frances Perkins, also sought to implement (Herrera González). It meant extending a network of social rights that would guarantee, among others, that Latin Ameri-

24 “Having all solved the economic problem, what concern could we have from family freedom, love freedom, scientific freedom, artistic freedom?” [“Teniendo todos resueltos el problema económico, ¿qué preocupación puede dar la libertad familiar, la libertad amorosa, la libertad científica, la libertad artística?”] (Alerta 162).

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can countries did not swing on the side of the Axis powers, with the consequent danger to raw materials and trade with the United States, as an extension of the USA attempt, late in 1938, to change its policy toward the arms embargo during the Spanish Civil War.25 Consequently, during Jiménez’s trip to the Southern Cone and the 1948 USA presidential campaign, the poet’s declarations in favor of a détente policy with the Soviet Union was in line with Wallace’s vision. Regarding his opinions in relation to world problems, [Jiménez] made it clear that he understands that the world is moving forward inexorably by its own volition and that the job of politicians is to foresee its evolution and anticipate it by touching the small springs that allow us to take full advantage of them. When questioned about Mr. Wallace, with whom he fosters a close friendship, he described him as a great idealist comparable to Lincoln or Jefferson, extraordinarily cultivated in all respects, and above all, a notable Hispanist who, due to his spiritual and romantic tendency, prefers Spanish Mystics such as Santa Teresa de Jesús, San Juan de la Cruz and Fray Luis de León. He believes that he is correct on international matters in thinking that only through an understanding with Russia may we avoid the new war that threatens humanity. And he affirmed that interesting consequences could follow from his [Wallace’s]26 next trip to Russia. [En lo referente a su opinión con relación a los problemas de carácter mundial dejó sentado que tiene el concepto de que el mundo se mueve hacia delante por propia volición en forma inexorable y que la labor de los políticos consiste en prever las evoluciones y anticiparse a ellas tocando los pequeños resortes que permitan aprovecharlas al máximo. Interrogados sobre Mr. Wallace, con quien le une una entrañable amistad, le describió como un gran idealista comparable a Lincoln o a Jefferson, de extraordinaria cultura en todos los aspectos y sobre todo un hispanista notable que prefiere por su tendencia espiritual y romántica, los místicos españoles como Santa Teresa de Jesús, San Juan de la Cruz y Fray Luis de León. Cree que está acertado en materia internacional al pensar que úni-

25 These issues are also discussed further within this volume in Dr. Espasa’s contribution, and our dialogue (Uriagereka and Naharro-Calderon) with Prof. Noam Chomsky. 26 Wallace never travelled to the U.S.S.R.

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camente mediante un entendimiento con Rusia puede evitarse la nueva guerra que amenaza a la humanidad. Y afirmó que de su próximo viaje a Rusia pueden derivarse interesantes consecuencias.] (Por obra del instante 308-309)

The Wallace doctrine represented one more link between USA and Latin American modernity, una poética del Pacífico [a Poetics for the Pacific], as coined by Jiménez and later taught in his course on Modernism at the University of Puerto Rico in 1953. My long stay in the Union —he added— has renewed my intimate contact with North American and Hispanic American literatures, which I have always cultivated and whose knowledge I have deepened. I hold, at the University of Maryland, a chair of Spanish poetry and I have been able to observe, year after year, how the new generations’ interest grows in that country towards our matters. For now, Spanish is the most widely studied language in the United States: French, Russian, and German follow. But there has always been an intense bond between North American and Spanish-speaking countries. It seems useless for me to refer here, since it is

Juan Ramón Jiménez Hall (University of Maryland).

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Juan Ramón Jiménez Hall, Department of Spanish and Portuguese (School of Languages Literatures and Cultures) Building, University of Maryland, named in 1981 after Zenobia Camprubí Aymar and Juan Ramón Jiménez’s teaching presence at the College Park campus (1943-1951), thanks to Prof. Graciela Palau-Nemes’s initiative.

Juan Gómez Macías, Luna verde de enero [January Green Moon] (2006), Jiménez Hall, University of Maryland.

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well known, to the influence exerted by Poe and Walt Whitman on the intellectuals of the New Continent. Then, when the war in Cuba took place, the tendency to exalt everything Spanish grew among the Spanish poets, and the North Americans had the tendency to do the same with their homeland, thus emerging in the Union an “American” generation, equivalent to that of Unamuno and Azorín. That influence weakened then, but it has reappeared today. There are poets like Archibald McLeish whose powerful personality has left deep traces in Latin American creations. [Mi larga estada en la Unión —añadió— ha renovado mi contacto íntimo con las literaturas norteamericanas y de la América hispana, que he cultivado siempre y cuyo conocimiento he ahondado. Dicto en la Universidad de Maryland, una cátedra de poesía española y he podido observar año a año cómo se multiplica el interés de las nuevas generaciones de aquel país hacia las cosas nuestras. Por lo pronto, el español es ahora el idioma que se estudia más en los Estados Unidos: le siguen el francés, el ruso, el alemán. Pero siempre ha existido una vinculación intensa entre los norteamericanos y los países de habla hispana. Me parece inútil aludir aquí, por muy conocida, a la influencia ejercida por Poe y Walt Whitman sobre los intelectuales de nuevo continente. Luego, al producirse la guerra de Cuba, creció entre los poetas españoles la tendencia a exaltar todo lo español, y en los norteamericanos la de hacer lo propio con su patria, surgiendo así en la Unión una generación “americana”, equivalente a la de Unamuno y Azorín. La influencia se debilitó entonces, pero ha vuelto a manifestarse en la actualidad. Hay poetas como Archibald McLeish cuya poderosa personalidad ha dejado rastros profundos en las creaciones de América Latina.] (Por obra del instante 289)27

Furthermore, as an independent representative of the Spanish Republican exile cause against the Franco regime, Jiménez had a clear vision in 1943-44 about the possible road to freedom in Spain. He tried to lobby for a positive outcome, attempting to remove the English roadblock, that would then hinder, as with the 1936-39 Non-In-

27 Archibald McLeish, Director of the Hispanic Room at the Library of Congress, had invited Jiménez to speak on the radio on the occasion of the launching, on June 22, 1944, at the Southeastern Shipbuilding Co, Savannah GA, of a Liberty Boat, the Rubén Darío, later damaged by a Nazi U Boat on January 27, 1945 at the St. Georges Channel.

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tervention policy, the removal of Franco as a favored anticommunist ally. And Juan Ramón also opposed the Don Juan monarchical option defended by Indalecio Prieto in 1948: The problem of Spain should be solved, in my opinion, between the USA and Russia, since England would always be a drag in this matter. I think that Russian Communism, maybe good for Russia, does not have to be implanted in other countries, since each one, even if it were collectivist, has its own personality due to its traditions and character. And I can see that the United States has never had a clear account of the Spanish situation because they cannot understand it and should not allow such an enormous influence from England. An American, Henry Wallace, is, among the men I know, the most able one to understand the problems of our times, because of his complete and cultivated personality full of culture, nurturing, natural capacity, practical and ideal sense, optimism and material strength. He is the man that incarnates what the United States should be these days. He certainly understands the problem of Spain, because he knows its history profoundly. [El problema de España debiera resolverse, a mi juicio, entre los Estados Unidos y Rusia, ya que Inglaterra sería siempre un peso muerto en este asunto. Creo que el comunismo ruso, bueno quizás para Rusia, no debe ser implantado en otros países, ya que cada uno, aunque fuera colectivista, tiene su propia personalidad por tradición y carácter. Y entiendo que los Estados Unidos no se han dado nunca cuenta de la clara situación de España porque no la sabe(n) comprender, y que no debiera(n) dejarse influir tanto por Inglaterra. Un americano, Henry Wallace, es, entre los hombres que yo conozco, el más capacitado para comprender, por su personalidad completa de cultura, cultivo, capacidad natural, sentido ideal y práctico, optimismo y fuerza material, el problema de nuestra época. Es el hombre que a mi modo de ver encarna lo que los Estados Unidos debieran ser en la actualidad. Él sí comprende el problema de España, porque conoce su historia a fondo.] (Guerra en España 56)

In the Diario de Paraná, he added on August 30, 1948: Juan Ramón speaks softly and sadly when we touch on the matter. We brief him on the updates on a monarchical solution through Don Juan. He replies that this is an impossible English solution. The time of the kings is

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over. Spain, which has known the Republic and lived fully within it, will have no part in a solution of this nature. It may be imposed as now they impose what we know. But Spain will continue to shake its head negatively. [Juan Ramón habla bajo y con tristeza cuando tocamos el asunto. Le decimos que se actualiza otra vez el tema de una solución monárquica con Don Juan. Nos responde que esa es una solución inglesa imposible. Ya pasó la época de los reyes. España, que conoció la República y vivió días de plenitud con ella, no tendrá ni parte en una solución de tal naturaleza. Se la pueden imponer como ahora le imponen lo que sabemos. Y España seguirá moviendo la cabeza negativamente.] (Por obra del instante 320)

Unfortunately, we know that Spain had to endure a long dictatorial journey up to 1977. When Juan Ramón, on March 7, 1945, anticipated the international stalemate about Spain’s future, he refused to speak on the radio to his fellow countrymen along with Wallace through the Office of War Information. A dismayed Zenobia wrote in her Diary about Wallace persuading her spouse to change his mind, although she anticipated he would be unable to do so: “This afternoon a committee of the Office of War Information failed to convince J.R. to speak to Spain, along with Henry Wallace. Only H. A. Wallace could convince him and I doubt he’ll try to do it” [“Esta tarde un comité de la O.W.I. trató de convencer a J.R., sin éxito, de que hablara a España con Henry Wallace. Solamente H. A. W[allace] lo puede convencer y dudo que trate de hacerlo”] (275-276). Nevertheless, Juan Ramón’s poetical campaigning for his friend and neighbor, Henry Wallace, did not end in late 1947, as Zenobia and the poet moved out of their Washington residence to 4310 Queensberry Road in Riverdale, Maryland, after the USA Vice President’s demotion to Department of Commerce Secretary (March 1, 1945) and later resignation from the Truman cabinet (September 20, 1946). Juan Ramón’s trip to the Southern Cone in 1948 represented another moment in which he was able to embody his friend and frustrated USA leader’s social and universal projects, so close to his own. But as if the fate of Spain’s future was to unwind itself from another grotesque trompe l’oeil, around the time of the Jiménez’s move to Riverdale, and almost across from their residence in Washington,

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the Francoist government was readying to refit its Embassy, a neo-Andalusian mansion purchased by the Primo de Rivera administration in 1926.28 It had been designed by the Gilded Age architect George Oakley Totten (1866-1939), whose imprint had signed several diplo-

Prof. Graciela Palau-Nemes in front of the former Jiménez’s residence (1947-1951), 4310 Queensberry Road, Riverdale, Maryland, 20737. From left to right, Juan Gómez Macías, a painter who has done extensive work on Jiménez’s Obra, among other, Luna verde de enero [Green January Moon] exhibited in Juan Ramón Jiménez Hall [p. 194], José María Naharro-Calderón and Prof. Mercedes Juliá (Vilanova University) during the 2006 Symposium Juan Ramón Jiménez and Zenobia Camprubí: From Maryland to the Nobel Prize. 28 After housing Spain’s Embassy and Consulate until 1994, and the Ambassador’s residence (2003), there is a project to transform it into a Cultural Center attached to the Cervantes Institute. Provisionally, it is occupied by Spain’s Cultural Office in the USA capital.

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Spain’s Embassy (1926-1994). Georges Oakley Totten, Architect, 1923. 2801 16th Street, NW, Washington D.C. 20009. Presently, the Cultural Office of the Embassy of Spain. matic residences in the area, in view of making Sixteenth Street into an “Embassy Row”. Built in 1923 by order of Mrs. Mary Henderson, niece of a Connecticut senator, in order to become the official residence for the United States’ Vice Presidents, the sudden rise of Calvin Coolidge to the presidency in the middle of that year stopped the project, and a later hypothetical occupancy by Henry Wallace in 1941.29 Instead, in 1948, a most sinister individual would disembark as Spanish Ambassador: José Félix de Lequerica (1891-1963), a major Francoist figure and radical Phalangist who in 1940 as Ambassador in Paris had conspired in order to detain Manuel Azaña, Cipriano RivasCherif and, most probably, Max Aub, among others, and was able to sequester to their death Lluis Companys, Julián Zugazagoitia and Joan Peiró (García Paz and Naharro-Calderón 75).30 Later, through 29 Wallace lived at 2600 Woodley Rd. NW, then New Additson Warbourne Hotel, known today as the Wardman Park Annex, relatively close to Zenobia and Juan Ramón Jiménez’s Dorchester House. 30 Zenobia protected Juan Ramón from his presence, as well as she could, as she writes to her spouse in 1951: “I have telephoned Annie so that she will not

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his USA lobbying, he managed to restore the strategic support of the USA Government for the Franco regime, sealing definitively the fate of the Second Spanish Republic in exile into oblivion within the framework of the Truman Doctrine and the Cold War, particularly after the signing on September 23, 1953 of the Pact of Madrid for the establishment of four USA bases in Spain, and later the admittance of Franco’s Spain into the United Nations in 1955, where Lequerica would be the regime’s first representative (1956-1963).31 In his writings about Wallace, Juan Ramón had added some sound and prophetic phrases that sadly resound in today’s oblivion: “Anything which is retrograde politics opens the road toward a violent revolution; and it would be better to situate ourselves at the end coming from the best of the beginnings” [“Todo lo que sea política retrógrada significa el camino hacia la revolución violenta; y sería mejor situarse conscientemente en el fin desde el mejor comienzo”] (Guerra en España 56). Indeed, as poets, Wallace and Jiménez had forgotten that mixing politics with poetry could bring about either deaf ears or a fiery expulsion from any republic. The detainers of discourses of power then and now, just as the señoritos [spoiled gentlemen] in Leopoldo Alas, a.k.a Clarín’s El sustituto, indeed were no poets, but prose writers.

Works Cited Accent, 5-8 (1945-1948). Alberti, Rafael. Selected Poems. English version by Lloyd Mallan. Cambridge: New Directions, 1944. Albornoz, Aurora de (ed.). Juan Ramón Jiménez. Madrid: Taurus, 1980. bring Lequerica along tomorrow.” The diplomat would hide his game behind his friendship with Ortega trying to amuse J.R. [through] “stories about him” [“He telefoneado a Annie para que no te lleve a Lequerica mañana (. . .) a J.R. contándole cuentos de él”] (Jiménez and Camprubí 1042). 31 Eslava Galán 448-450, 496. For Lequerica’s biography, see Morán, Los españoles que dejaron de serlo. Euskadi, 1937-198, 110-120.

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Aub, Max. El rapto de Europa, edited by José María Naharro-Calderón. Ciudad de México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2008. Azam, Gilbert. “Concepto y praxis de la política en Juan Ramón Jiménez.” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 376-378 (1981), pp. 356-378. — La obra de Juan Ramón Jiménez. Continuación y renovación de la lírica española. Madrid: Editorial Nacional, 1983. Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973. Campoamor González, Antonio. Bibliografía general de Juan Ramón Jiménez. Madrid: Taurus, 1982. Camprubí, Zenobia. Epistolario I. Cartas a Juan Guerrero Ruiz (1917-1956), edited by Graciela Palau de Nemes and Emilia Cortés Ibáñez. Madrid: Publicaciones de la Residencia de Estudiantes, 2006. — Diario. Estados Unidos 2. Madrid: Alianza, 1995. Cano, José Luís. Poesía española del siglo xx. Madrid: Guadarrama, 1960. Cowley, Malcolm. “Europe in Exile.” The New Republic, 24 Jan. 1944, pp. 120-121. — “Frost: A Dissenting Opinion.” The New Republic, 111.12, 11 Sep. 1944, pp. 312-313. — “The case Against Mr. Frost: II.” The New Republic, 111.12, 18 Sep. 1944, pp. 345-347. Eagleton, Terry. Literary History: An Introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Eslava Galán, Juan. Los años del miedo. La nueva España (19391952). Barcelona: Planeta, 2008. Fitts, Dudley (ed.). Anthology of Contemporary Latin-American Poetry. Cambridge: New Directions, 1942. García Lorca, Federico. Selected Poems. Cambridge: New Directions, 1942. García Paz, Beatriz and Naharro-Calderón, José María. Hacia el exilio. Madrid: Fundación Pablo Iglesias/Cátedra del Exilio, 2007. Gullón, Ricardo. “Centenario de Ezra Pound.” ABC: Sábado Cultural 247, 26 Oct. 1985, pp. I-VI. — Conversaciones con Juan Ramón Jiménez. Madrid: Taurus, 1958. Heidegger, Martin. Essais et conférences. Paris: Gallimard, 1958.

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Herrera González, Patricio. “La Confederación de trabajadores de América Latina en la historiografía obrera: 1938-1963.” Cuadernos De Historia (Santiago) 36.36 (2012), pp. 84-117, — “Vicente Lombardo Toledano y el Congreso Obrero Latinoamericano (1935-1938).” Relaciones Estudios de Historia y Sociedad 35.138 (2014), pp. 109-150, Jiménez, Juan Ramón. El modernismo: Notas de un curso. Madrid: Aguilar, [1953]1962. — Tercera antología poética (1898-1953). Edited by Eugenio Florit. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 1970. — Poesías últimas escojidas. Edited by Antonio Sánchez-Romeralo. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1982. — Alerta. Edited by Francisco Javier Blasco. Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1983. — Segunda antología poética. Edited by Leopoldo de Luis. Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1983. — Guerra en España. Edited by Ángel Crespo. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1985. — “Juan Ramón Jiménez: configuración poética de la obra,” edited by José M. Naharro-Calderón, Suplementos Anthropos 11 (1989). — “Juan Ramón Jiménez: la obra como construcción poética de la realidad,” edited by José M. Naharro-Calderón, Anthropos 7 (1989). — Tiempo. Edited by Mercedes Juliá. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 2001. — Por obra del instante. Entrevistas. Edited by Soledad González Ródenas. Sevilla: Fundación José Manuel Lara, 2013. — “Spanish Writer Juan Ramón Jiménez Reading from his Prose Lecture on Modernism”. https://www.loc.gov/item/93842920/ — Vida. Días de mi vida. Edited by Mercedes Juliá y María Ángeles Sanz Manzano. Valencia: Pre-Textos, 2014. Vol.1. — and Camprubí, Zenobia. Monumento de amor. Epistolario y Lira. Correspondencia 1913-1956. Edited by María Jesús Domínguez Sío. Madrid: Residencia de Estudiantes, 2017. Kagan, Richard L. The Spanish Craz: America’s Fascination with the Hispanic World, 1779-1939. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019.

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Kristeva, Julia. La révolution du langage poétique. Paris: Seuil, 1974. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits, I. Paris: Seuil, 1966. Machado, Antonio. La Guerra. Escritos 1936-1939. Madrid: Emiliano Escolar, 1983. Mann, Klaus and Kesten, Hermann (eds.). Heart of Europe: An Anthology of Creative Writing in Europe, 1920-1940. New York: L.B. Fisher, 1943. Masip, Paulino. El diario de Hamlet García. Barcelona: Anthropos, [1944]1987. Maze, John and White, Graham. Henry A. Wallace. His Search for a New World. Chapell Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Morán, Gregorio. Los españoles que dejaron de serlo. Euskadi, 19371981. Barcelona: Planeta, 1982. — El maestro en el erial: Ortega y Gasset y la cultura del franquismo. Barcelona: Tusquets, 1998. Naharro-Calderón, José María. “Juan Ramón Jiménez en el exilio: nostalgia, ética y obra (1939-1948).” La emigración y el exilio en la literatura hispánica del Siglo Veinte, edited by Myron Lichtblau. Miami: Universal, 1988, pp. 35-48. — “Los descentrados espacios del exilio de Juan Ramón Jiménez (1939-1954).” Medio siglo de cultura (1939-1989), edited by Manuel Abellán. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990, pp. 23-34. — “Juan Ramón Jiménez en Washington: De estética y ética estética estadounidenses.” Juan Ramón Jiménez: Actas del Cuarto Congreso de Málaga. Barcelona: Anthropos, 1991, pp. 299-314. — (ed.). El exilio de las Españas en las Américas. ¿Adónde fue la canción? Barcelona: Anthropos, 1991. — Entre el exilio y el interior: el entresiglo y Juan Ramón Jiménez. Barcelona: Anthropos, 1994. — “La nit que van prendre Dixie (segons una vella melodía cantada per Joan Báez).” Nació digital, 13 Feb. 2008, — “Juan Ramón Jiménez en EE.UU: entre la ética y la estética 1936, 1939-1951.” Contra el olvido El exilio español en Estados Unidos, edited by Sebastiaan Faber and Cristina Martínez Carazo. Alcalá de Henares: Universidad de Alcalá-InstitutoFranklin, 2009, pp. 61-79.

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— “El ‘Trumpazo’ y la náusea” [“Nausea and the Trumpist Effect”]. Fronterad, 2 Dec. 2016, https://www.fronterad.com/el-trumpazoy-la-nausea-la-in-esperada-eleccion-que-no-victoria-de-un-neoyorquino-jesus-gil/. — Entre alambradas y exilios. Sangrías de “las Españas” y terapias de Vichy. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2017. Neruda, Pablo. Residence on Earth and Other Poems, English version by Ángel Flores. Norfolk: New Directions, 1944. Ortega y Gasset, José. La rebelión de las masas. Madrid: EspasaCalpe, [1937] 2007. Palau de Nemes, Graciela. Inicios de Zenobiay Juan Ramón Jiménez en América. Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, 1982. Pérez Gallego, Cándido. “Juan Ramón Jiménez y T.S. Eliot.” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 376-378 (1981), pp. 911-925. Pérez Romero, Carmen. Juan Ramón Jiménez y la poesía anglosajona. Cáceres: Universidad de Extremadura, 1981. The Quarterly Review of Literature 1-3, 1943-1947. The Sewanee Review, vol. 52-55, 1945-1947. The Dial: A Semi-Monthly Journal of Literary Criticism 69 (1920). Resina, Juan Ramón. “Cold War Hispanism and the New Deal of Cultural Studies.” Spain Beyond Spain: Modernity, Literary History, and National Identity, edited by Brad Epps and Luis Fernández Cifuentes. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2005, pp. 70-108. Sala Zenobia y Juan Ramón Jiménez (SZ&JRJ). Correspondence from/ to Juan Ramón Jiménez. Salinas, Pedro and Guillén, Jorge. Correspondencia, edited by Andrés Soria Olmedo. Madrid: Tusquets, 1992. Sánchez Vázquez, Adolfo. “Del destierro al transtierro.” La cultura del exilio republicano español de 1939 2. Madrid: UNED, 2003, pp. 626-636. “Spanish Poet Juan Ramón Jiménez Speaking and Reading From his Work.” Library of Congress, Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1964. — Letters of Wallace Stevens, edited by Holly Stevens. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1970.

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— “The Irrational Element in Poetry.” The Poet’s Work, edited by Reginald Ribbons. Boston: Houghton, 1979, pp. 48-58. Stone, Oliver and Kuznick, Peter. The Untold History of the United States. New York: Gallery Books, 2012. Turnbull, Eleanor L. (ed.). Contemporary Spanish Poetry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1945. Villar, Arturo del. Crítica de la razón estética. (Elejemplo de J.R.J.). Madrid: Los Libros de Fausto, 1988. Wallace, Henry Agard. The Century of the Common Man. New York: Cornwall, 1943. — The Price of Vision. The Diary Henry A. Wallace, 1942-1946, edited by John Morton Blum. Boston: Houghton, 1973. Wilcox, John C. “An Inquiry into Juan Ramón Jiménez’s Interest in Walter Pater.” Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 7.2 (1983), pp. 184-199. — “Juan Ramón Jiménez and the Illinois Trio: Sandburg, Lindsay, Masters.” Comparative Literature Studies, 21.2 (1984), pp. 186-200. — “Naked” vs. “Pure” Poetry in Juan Ramón Jiménez, with Remarks on the Impact of W.B. Yeats.” Hispania 66.4 (1983), pp. 511, 521. — Self and Image in Juan Ramón Jiménez: Modern and Post-modern Reading. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1987. — “Williams Butler Yeats: Un ‘lírico del Norte’.” Ínsula 416-417, 1981, p. 8. Williams, William Carlos. Selected Essays. New York: Random House, 1954. — The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams (1909-1939). New York: New Directions, 1986. Young, Howard. “Anglo-American Poetry in the Correspondence of Luisa and Juan Ramón Jiménez.” Hispanic Review 44.1 (1976), pp. 1-26. — The Line in the Margin. Juan Ramón Jiménez and His Readings in Blake, Shelley, and Yeats. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1980. — “Lo que dicen los árboles: la amistad literaria entre Robert Frost y Juan Ramón Jiménez.” La Torre 111-114 (1981), pp. 289-309.

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Getting there: United States Contradictions, Mexico, and Popular Resistance

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Mexico, the United States and the Spanish Civil War: Diplomacy, Arms and Refugees Andreu Espasa Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (IIH-UNAM)

The Spanish Civil War was, essentially, a European conflict. All the countries who signed the Non-Intervention Pact were European. The most directly involved countries in the war were also from the Old Continent, as well most of the weapons used. And yet the conflict also had a North American side that needs to be taken into account. Whether by action or omission, the role of the United States and Mexico was decisive in its final outcome. At the same time, the Spanish war generated a debate on foreign policy that had a strong influence on both countries. For Mexico, the political and social polarization around the Spanish conflict paved the way for the moderate turn the regime took in 1940, when president Cárdenas leaned

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towards Manuel Ávila Camacho as his successor. Receiving thousands of Spanish refugees would eventually have a meaningful impact on the country, especially on its culture and college education. As for the United States, the Spanish war was crucial for the transformation of American strategic thinking, since it contributed to ending the isolationist consensus. A comparative analysis of Mexico and the United States policies towards the Spanish Civil War is useful and relevant for several reasons. First of all, because their actions were partially influenced by the corresponding neighboring country. Moreover, despite their essential differences, the geopolitical crisis of the conditions of the late thirties fueled a dynamic of rapprochement between both diplomacies, which would culminate in the political solution to the oil expropriation decreed by President Cárdenas in March 1938 and a strong regional alliance in the Second World War.

Democratic Support versus Appeasing Neutrality In the summer of 1936, when war broke out in Spain, Mexico’s attitude consisted in a determined support for Spanish democracy’s cause on all fronts. Already, in August 1936, President Cárdenas ordered the shipment of twenty thousand rifles to Spain, thus becoming the first country to support the Spanish Republican government with arms, even before the Soviet Union (Cárdenas, Apuntes 354-55). On the diplomatic front, Mexico stood for an uncompromising defense of international law: Mexican diplomacy opposed the NonIntervention Committee from the outset. Since Berlin and Rome’s support for the insurgent Spanish military was manifest, Mexico repeatedly called on the League of Nations to apply its principles of collective security: any aggression against a member state should be responded to with collective support to the victim of aggression while imposing sanctions and isolation to the aggressor. Building the argument from its own historical experience, Mexican diplomacy considered that so-called “Non-Intervention” violated international law and was not even neutral, since it denied the right of a constitutional and

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internationally recognized State to buy weapons in order to quell an internal rebellion with foreign support. Equating the rights of a constitutional Government with that of a military rebellion was, in fact, a form of intervention. By defending the principles of international law Mexico showed its solidarity with an ideologically close regime and, at the same time, developed a reasonable strategy to advance the national interests of Mexico, since international impunity for foreign aggression could eventually pose a danger to its own regime. Its insistence on rejecting the policy of Non-Intervention led to the paradoxical situation of maintaining a more inflexible discourse than the Spanish Republican diplomacy itself. As the head of the Mexican delegation in Geneva sharply pointed out, Mexican foreign policy towards Spain could become “more Catholic than the Pope.” (Fabela, Genève, July 27, 1937, 41). As for the United States, although Washington didn’t belong to the League of Nations, its policy towards Spain was indeed partially justified by its alignment with Geneva. In the summer of 1936, the Roosevelt Administration issued a “moral embargo” on arms against both sides in Spain. Since it was “moral”, not legal, the Spanish embargo amounted to a mere recommendation without legal effects for manufacturers and merchants of armament. However, the arms-producing companies were very disciplined and the American armament market was effectively shut down to Spain. This obedient attitude did not respond so much to the alleged patriotism of the American businessmen but to the consequences of First World War collective memory. In the late thirties, a majority of citizens believed that the United States had entered the European war because of the deception perpetrated by Wall Street bankers, allied propagandists, and arms manufacturers. The isolationist consensus had prompted the approval of the first Neutrality Law in 1935, which provided for the establishment of automatic embargoes for nations at war, without distinction between aggressor countries and countries victims of aggression. When Spain was plunged into civil war, the Roosevelt Administration soon realized that there was no legal way to issue an embargo for both sides, since the neutrality law did not include cases of civil war. However, the State Department knew that industry leaders had little

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incentive to ignore the moral embargo. The profits that they could obtain from the sale of arms to Spain did not compensate for the fact that the national government was its main client, in a context, moreover, in which it was not uncommon to hear proposals in Capitol Hill in favor of nationalizing the arms industry. The moral embargo would work well for six months. In January 1937, Congress —with almost unanimous support, with the exception of Minnesota congressman John T. Bernard— decided to legalize it in order to stop the challenge of Spanish Republican diplomacy, which on one occasion managed to load the ship Mar Cantábrico with American weapons in New York at the initiative of the Spanish ambassador in Mexico, Félix Gordón Ordás (Stuhler). Eventually, the embargo would be revoked with Franco’s victory and American recognition of the new Fascist regime, in April 1939. A Democratic congressman from Washington State, John Coffee, lamented that Roosevelt didn’t sell arms to the Spanish democratic government during its fight against Fascism but now a victorious Franco could buy them: “[. . .] our arms may be helpful in mopping up the discordant elements. I hate to see my government fight democracy at the behest of perfidious Albion or of Franco” (“Our Recognition of Franco Scored.”) The moral embargo was part of the so-called policy of appeasement. This policy was carried by the main democratic powers of the thirties and it implied a sympathetic attitude to the grievances of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy and their challenges to the status quo imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. While the League of Nations system was discredited after failing to stop Japanese expansionism in East Asia and the global trend towards rearmament, the promises of the collective security system were gradually replaced by a flexible policy of concessions to Rome and Berlin. This policy is often associated with London and Paris, with its well-known episodes: acquiescence to Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia and intervention in Spain, culminating in the Munich conference of November 1938. However, the United States also practiced its own form of appeasement, which, by some measures, was arguably even more radical than the British and the French, since its neutrality laws automatically prevented any attempt to distinguish between aggressor and attacked nations (Offner). In the

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Spanish case, the logic of appeasement and the isolationist consensus reinforced each other in 1936, although very soon several isolationist leaders became aware that the embargo was excessively subordinate to the British Foreign Office and they advocated a change of course. In the spring of 1937, the isolationist senator Gerald P. Nye was calling for an extension of the embargo on Italy and Germany for their undeniable involvement in the Spanish war. A year later, Nye himself called for the restoration of the arms trade with Republican Spain (Cole 113-114). In this situation, Roosevelt not only refused to apply American neutrality legislation for fear of embarrassing Mussolini and bringing him closer to Hitler, but, shortly after ruling out the embargo against Italy, he even sent a warm letter to the Italian dictator, showing some understanding for his colonial grievances: It seems clear to me that if nations cannot agree on armament reduction, even if it be in the form of a progressive reduction over a period of years, they can far more effectively discuss political instruments for reduction of trade barriers, thus building up employment in industry to take place of employment in armament. And I recognize that as a part of the discussion of increasing trade, every consideration should be given to a more ready access to raw materials’ markets for those nations which in themselves do not produce the raw materials necessary to industry. I am confident, my dear Duce, that you share with me the fear that the trend of the present international situation is ominous to peace. [. . .] I have often wished that I might talk to you frankly and in person because from such a meeting great good might come. (Franklin D. Roosevelt to Benito Mussolini, Jul. 29, 1937, PSF: Italy: CT, vol. 6, 220)

Another relevant issue is how Mexico and Washington reacted to Spain’s humanitarian needs. Mexico stood out for its generosity with Spanish refugees. In June 1937 already, 456 children arrived in Mexico, the so-called children of Morelia. Even before the war was over, Mexico made public its commitment to welcome the Spanish democrats if they are finally defeated. Eventually more than 20,000 Spanish refugees would settle in Mexico. Among them was a prominent minority of intellectuals (Lida 76). The Roosevelt Administration, by contrast, did little to nothing. A concerted effort was made to

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receive Basque children, supported by a committee that would have been chaired by Claude Bowers, the American ambassador to Spain, but when the American Catholic hierarchy showed its fierce opposition, the project collapsed (Traina 194-196). At the end of the war, Mexican diplomacy tried to get several countries to share the effort of hosting refugees. The Roosevelt Administration not only did not participate, but they also held back the Panamanian government’s interest, since it was thought that Spanish refugees could pose a threat to American interests in the Panama Canal (Rosenweig).

The Process of Convergence, Oil Nationalization and the Mexican Franco As we have seen, Mexico helped the Spanish Republic’s cause all along the way —they actually kept formal relations with the Spanish Republican Government in exile until 1977, while the United States maintained the embargo throughout the conflict, thus contributing to Franco’s victory. However, this should not obscure the fact that both Mexico and the United States were influenced by each other’s policy towards Spain. For Mexican diplomacy, the American attitude was crucial in shaping their solidarity towards the Spanish Republic. In the beginning, not only did Mexico sell some of its own weapons to Spain, but also tried to become a proxy buyer. For obvious geographical reasons, Mexico was well-located to buy American weapons and then resell them to Republican Spain. It could have been Mexico’s greatest contribution to the Spanish war, but very soon American diplomacy reacted with alarm to the prospect that the southern neighbor would effectively cancel their embargo against Spain. The alarm was reinforced by the awareness that Washington had no legal way to prevent the purchase of American weapons in Mexico and their subsequent use in a third country. The tension between the two countries over this issue increased, until the State Department recommended that Roosevelt threaten the Mexican ambassador to the United States with an arms embargo on Mexico over the Spanish conflict (Sumner).

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Faced with the obvious discomfort of USA diplomacy, Cárdenas accepted their requests and set a clear limit to solidarity with Republican Spain: Mexico would help Spain buy arms, provided that it had the approval of the manufacturing country (Cárdenas, Epistolario). For the United States, Mexico’s influence on its policy toward Spain was equally significant. This influence had to do with the Roosevelt Administration’s only successful foreign policy during the Great Depression years: the so-called Good Neighbor Policy. Already, in his inauguration speech in March 1933, Roosevelt had promised to establish a policy of good neighborliness. Although at first it was not directly associated with Latin America, this slogan soon came to mean a fundamental turn in inter-American relations. Roosevelt tried to improve America’s standing in the region with a new attitude towards his neighbors: greater respect for the formal sovereignty of all American republics, including a promise of Non-Intervention in their domestic affairs, and a new leadership based on the principle of inter-American consultations. The Good Neighbor Policy had somewhat clumsy and bumpy beginnings, but it soon consolidated, especially due to a series of small substantial gestures that seemed to confirm the rhetoric of the new change, such as the repeal of the Platt Amendment of the Cuban Constitution. However, it was in 1938 that Mexico really tested the sincerity of the Good Neighbor Policy by nationalizing its oil industry, a historical event that, as historian Clayton Koppes has pointed out, implied a significant novelty: for the first time, a country from the periphery nationalized an economic resource that was mainly export-oriented. Washington’s reaction was initially hostile. It suspended the Mexican silver purchase program and the State Department issued a statement so harsh that the American ambassador in Mexico City, Josephus Daniels had to suggest to his Mexican colleagues to act as if they had never received it, because otherwise it would have led to an inevitable diplomatic breakup. However, a much less confrontational approach was soon adopted, opening the doors to a peaceful and negotiated solution which was highly beneficial for Mexico’s further economic development, and which gave great credibility to Roosevelt’s promises in relation to the Good Neighbor Policy. In adopting this conciliatory ap-

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proach, Spain’s role as an example to avoid was crucial. In 1936 appeasements policies, conveniently allied to the highly popular isolationist feeling, had dominated American diplomacy, but in 1937 things were changing, especially in Spain. When the war broke up, the Spanish Republic’s international image was negatively affected by intense anti-clerical violence and by the apparent similarities with the collapse of pre-Soviet Russia, with workers in arms and moderate politicians overwhelmed by the rise of radicalism. The military inefficiency of the Republican side had not helped to arouse sympathy for the Spanish democracy either. But throughout 1937 the Republican government did greatly improve its military capabilities and managed to score a series of notable defensive victories, especially around Madrid. In these battles, the nearly 2,600 American volunteers of the celebrated Lincoln Brigade played an important role, showing great courage and helping to popularize the cause of the Spanish Republic to the American public. Moreover, clerical violence had diminished and, in the eyes of international public opinion, the Francoist side was losing the battle of image, both because of its bombardments against civilian population and because of the growing presence of Italian and German troops on Spanish soil. However, it should be noted that the great wave of outrage over the Guernica bombing also raised some uncomfortable questions about its moral foundation. The editors of The Crisis, the NAACP publication, regretted that other atrocities had not aroused the same degree of popular rejection: The civilized world stands shocked as the slaughter rained from the skies upon Guernica, the Holy City of the Basques in northern Spain. [. . .] A year ago Fascist aviators for Mussolini were swooping their big bombing Machines over the mud villages of Ethiopia and blotting out the lives of women and children. The world murmured, but it did not cry out as it has done at Guernica. The ghastly Fascist philosophy of force is thus laid bare for all the world to see. It matters not whether the Fascists are Italians or Germans and the victims Basques or Ethiopians. Fascism means death to freedom [. . .]. (“Death to Men and Freedom”)

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Beyond the Spanish conflict, 1937 was also a decisive year for two other reasons. First, the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War in the summer fueled a slow change in Roosevelt’s foreign policy, while, at the same time, the president shifted from indifference to a clear preference for a defeat of Franco’s forces in the Spanish conflict. Even more relevant for the Spanish case was the self-coup of Getulio Vargas in Brazil in November 1937. The coup established a new regime, the Estado Novo, with evident Fascist echoes. At the same time, in the fall of 1937 there was a constant display of activity by the Nazi Party among the German communities throughout Latin America, including political parades with Nazi uniforms. German economic diplomacy also made significant inroads in the region by offering attractive trade deals that did not require hard currency reserves. These events ignited a wave of alarm about a growing threat of Fascist penetration in the region. In this context, the perception of the Spanish war changed substantially. It was no longer seen as a purely European conflict. Given the cultural and linguistic ties between Spain and its former colonies, a victorious Franco could serve as a bridge to expand the geopolitical influence of Rome and Berlin in the Americas, effectively challenging the Monroe Doctrine. Furthermore, the same model of Fascist intervention in Spain —external military support, especially through modern aviation, to a rebellion led by reactionary officers— could be easily exported to Latin America, since the region had its own long tradition of military intervention in public affairs. In this way, the European Fascist powers could aspire to gain geopolitical influence with little effort and almost no risk. In Foreign Affairs, Carleton Beals, an expert on Latin American issues, echoed this concern: At the present moment no European Power is likely to invade Latin America. But the activity there of the totalitarian states, and the growth of their economic and political power, might produce a set of circumstances which they could exploit as they have exploited the civil war in Spain. The United States has pledged its word not to intervene in Latin America; but no European Power has made any such pledge. [. . .] These possibilities may force us to a reappraisal of the Monroe Doctrine: ter-

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ritorial conquest is no longer the only European danger with which we have to reckon in Latin America.

Among the Latin American countries, the most likely candidate —and definitely the most worrying, due to its size and location— to suffer an intervention by international Fascism that would lead to a “Spanish-like” civil war was Mexico. After all, the Mexican regime had a similar ideology, and like Spain, political and economic divisions ran deep. The Mexican right was very sympathetic to the Spanish Franco regime, a trend strengthened by the Hispanic leanings of Mexican conservatism. In addition, Cárdenas’s ambitious reformism had earned him great popularity, but along the way, the Mexican president had also antagonized relevant sectors of Mexican society. His rise and consolidation in power had implied the political defenestration of Plutarco Elías Calles, who from his exile in California would have no qualms about trying to obtain financing from the Falangists to overthrow the Cardenista regime (Meyer “Calles vs. Calles”). Oil nationalization had also fed potential conspiracies among businessmen and the military, who, inspired by the Spanish example, could reasonably bet on foreign intervention for their risky plans. For many, the military insurrection of Saturnino Cedillo in the state of San Luis Potosí in the spring of 1938 could only be interpreted as an attempt to replicate the Spanish conflict in Mexico. In a press conference, Roosevelt himself pointed out that same possibility: Suppose certain foreign governments, European governments, were to do in Mexico what they did in Spain. Suppose they would organize a revolution, a Fascist revolution in Mexico. Mexico is awfully close to us. Suppose they were to send planes and officers and guns and were to equip the revolutionists and get control to the whole of Mexico and thereupon run the Mexican Government, run the Mexican Army and build it up with hundreds of planes. Do you think that the United States could stand idly by and have this European menace right on our own borders? Of course not. You could not stand for it. That means we would have to have a big enough Navy to keep them from getting into Mexico. Mind you, the Mexican flag is still flying. Mind you, it is not the Spanish flag; it is not the Italian flag or the German flag. We probably all agree

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that we could not stand for a foreign nation doing that under the guise of a Mexican flag. Q. Isn’t the three thousand miles sufficient? The president: Yes, it is a long distance across the ocean. We would not be attacked from across the ocean, however, if they came from Mexico. Q. Yes, but there isn’t any reason now for any European nation to come across and establish such a conflict in Mexico. The president: They did it in Spain. Q. I know, but that is across the Atlantic. The president: It is three days from Germany, and Mexico is only seven days from Germany (A special press).

Meanwhile, the Mexican government used the analogy between Spain and Mexico to educate American public opinion on the dangers of following oil companies’ political line. In 1938 an envoy of the Mexican government presented this argument at the University of Virginia: Let us remind the people of the United States that a democratic Mexico is undoubtedly a better, more sincere neighbor than a fascist Mexico. If the oil trusts and their allies succeed in pushing my country to the verge of chaos, not Cedillo perhaps, but any other instrument of his base type may serve their purpose in sending Mexico back to the Middle Ages, destroying the purchasing power of our country’s population, 50% of whose imports come from the United States. But we feel confident that this dream, so heartily cherished by the oil monopolies and Mr. Chamberlain will not easily come true. In any event, Mexico will fight; and if the drama of Spain is to be reenacted in our country, there will be a better chance for us to be victorious against the darkest forces of reaction and imperialism than the betrayed Spanish democracy has had so far. (Carrillo 27-30)

By invoking the Spanish tragedy, Mexican diplomacy was trying to convince Washington that the oil issue should not be confined to an economic discussion about the amount and terms of compensation, but that it should be treated in the broader context of the interwar

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geopolitical crisis. However, president Cárdenas was not only limiting himself to good arguments. He also used a strategy of bluffing by feeding American fears. Cornered by the boycott of the big oil companies and without support among the great democracies, Cárdenas sent disturbing signals about a possible change of alliances, as Stalin would end up doing with the Ribentropp-Molotov pact. Mexico sold oil to Nazi Germany and made some conciliatory gestures to Hitler, such as the return of the Mexican ambassador to Berlin. Mexico’s strategy was thus twofold. On the one hand, it proposed an antifascist alliance that would help the dying Spanish democracy and strengthen democracy in the world. On the other, hi threatened a change of alliances if the great democratic powers kept punishing Mexico for carrying out a legitimate measure of economic nationalism (Meyer, México 391-93). American diplomacy also sent mixed messages. In 1938, Roosevelt seemed to be looking for a way to help the Spanish Republicans, whether it was helping to finance their war effort, proposing humanitarian aid schemes to feed the Republican side in the last winter of the war, or even exploring the possibility of lifting the embargo by executive decree. By then, the Roosevelt Administration was clearly eager to avoid a complete military defeat for the Republicans. The president even came up with a plan to secretly provide arms to Republican Spain, but it ultimately did not work due to a combination of excessive secrecy and a lack of real commitment (Tierney). In June 1937 he had scolded Torkild Rieber, Texaco’s chairman, for selling fuel on credit to the Franco side (“Telegrams given Roosevelt by Fernando de los Ríos” 346-348). In any case, the most important gesture took place in 1938: the purchase of at least 47 tons of Spanish silver, with which the Republic was able to obtain a large amount of hard currency (Whealey). In the Roosevelt Administration, the most widely invoked justification for these kind of actions was the concern for Fascist penetration in Latin America. Some critics of Roosevelt’s foreign policy denounced this argument as a mere convenient exaggeration (Beard 496-97). After all, focusing the danger of Fascist expansionism in Latin America —and, specially, in Mexico— helped overcome the isolationist feeling in a smooth way. After all, isolationism was never

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incompatible with the Monroe Doctrine, and indeed many isolationists even viewed the Pacific as a relevant sphere for American interests. Essentially, isolationism implied a refusal to get involved in European affairs. Whether it was sincere or deliberately amplified, the geopolitical alarm on the Fascist penetration of the Americas allowed the Roosevelt Administration to educate the public on the dangers of Fascist expansionism while respecting its isolationist feelings about Europe. According to a survey in July 1940, only 3% believed that war should be declared on Germany and Italy, despite the fact that the British allies had been in combat for almost a year. However, this percentage rose to 67% in the event that Hitler tried to control a South American country (Cantril). The Spanish war and its influence on the relationship with Mexico also helped change fundamental aspects of American strategic thinking. Thanks to the lessons learned from observing the Spanish conflict, the Roosevelt Administration began to employ the “Fifth Column” concept and to gauge modern air war’s effects. By accepting a negotiated solution with Mexico to avoid a Spanish-style civil war, Washington assumed a new vision of foreign policy in which the defense of American corporate interests with assets abroad was to be subordinated to national security considerations (Andreu, Haglund). The Spanish Civil War was also important to American military and racial history: Oliver Law, battalion commander in the Lincoln Brigade, was the first African-American officer to command white soldiers (Carroll 188). On the other hand, Mexico’s attitude towards Spain was also useful for those who wanted to learn. In January 1939, when the country was still debating the possibility of canceling the embargo against Spain, John Q. Tilson, a prominent Republican Party congressman, summed up how the American perception on the Spanish war had evolved and how Mexican diplomacy had thrown some light on the alleged risks of selling arms to the Spanish Republic: We assumed in those days that what happened in Spain was no affair of this hemisphere. Now we know better as to that too. [. . .] the fate of that European which to the greater part of this continent is the mother

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country means more to us than the fate of any other country in Europe. We cannot any longer comfort ourselves with the thought that Spain’s troubles are not ours. [. . .] It is time then that we abandoned a policy towards Spain which puts the Fascist powers in a position to control the destinies of Latin America. [. . .] a republic to the south of us has been shipping munitions to Spain, openly and on the basis of recognized obligations under international law. Yet Mexico has not been threatened with war by Franco, by Hitler or by Mussolini. We know that Mexico is far more vulnerable to attack by Fascist powers than is the United States. Is it likely that the Fascist powers which do not dare to say “boo” when Mexico ships arms to Spain will rise up and go to war against the United States if the United States does the same thing? (Tilson 8)

Indeed, Mexico had helped the Spanish Republicans in a principled and courageous way, while the great powers claimed to be neutral for fear of provoking Hitler and Mussolini. Mexico also developed a policy of intense generosity with Spanish refugees, challenging the excuses and rationalizations of richer countries. This last lesson is especially useful in today’s world, where the growing needs for humanitarian action are not receiving a decent response. The Spanish case also illustrates that Mexico played in Geneva a role similar to Nehru’s India in the early years of the United Nations. Mexican diplomacy used the League of Nations as a platform to address the world and present a progressive vision of international relations. Aiming to help Spain and to enhance Mexico’s international standing, Mexican diplomacy was also trying to lead a block of countries on the periphery, which would put a stop to the traditional supremacism of the great Western powers and which would be, at the same time, independent of the Moscow project. Mexican diplomat Isidro Fabela believed that the Spanish conflict was the perfect opportunity for the “small nations” to make themselves noticed at the League of Nations. For obvious reasons, you could hardly expect anything like that from American diplomacy. Although Roosevelt had progressive leanings and rejected the aggressive expansionism of the Nazis, his policy could not be radically different from France’s and England’s because America shared with these powers the status of “imperial democracies” or “democratic empires.” This dual con-

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dition of democracy and empire has often confused observers. As democracies, London, Paris and Washington were expected to support the cause of the Spanish Republic, but as imperial powers, their foreign policy priorities might not always coincide with the interests of smaller democracies, as was tragically the case for the Spanish Republic.

Works Cited “A Special Press Conference with Members of the Associated Church Press,” Washington D.C., 20 Apr. 1938. The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Harper, 1941, vol. 1938, pp. 255-256. Beals, Carleton. “Totalitarian Inroads in Latin America.” Foreign Affairs 17.1, Oct. (1938), p. 89. Beard, Charles A. and Beard, Mary R. Americain Midpassage. The Macmillian Company, 1939, pp. 496-497. Cantril, Hadley. “America Faces the War: A Study in Public Opinion.” The Public Opinion Quarterly 4.3, Sept. (1940), pp. 390-393. Cárdenas, Lázaro. Apuntes. Vol. I. Ciudad de México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1972. — Epistolario de Lázaro Cárdenas. Vol. I. Presentación de Elena Vázquez Gómez. Ciudad de México: Siglo XXI, 1974, p. 296. Carrillo, Alejandro. The Mexican People and the Oil Companies. Ciudad de México: D.A.P.P., 1938. Carroll, Peter N. La odisea de la brigada Abraham Lincoln: los norteamericanos en la Guerra Civil Española. Sevilla: Espuela de Plata, 2005. Cole, Wayne S. Senator Gerald P. Nye and American Foreign Relations. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962, pp. 113-114. Daniels, Josephus. Shirt-sleeve Diplomat. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1947, pp. 233-234. “Death to Men and Freedom.” The Crisis, June (1937), p. 177.

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Espasa, Andreu. Estados Unidos en la Guerra Civil española. Madrid: Los Libros de la Catarata, 2017. Haglund, David G. Latin America and the Transformation of U.S. Strategic Thought 1936-1940. Alburquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984. Fabela, Isidro. Cartas al Presidente Cárdenas. S.n., 1947, p. 41. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Foreign Affairs, vol. 5/6. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1980. Koppes, Clayton R. “The Good Neighbor Policy and the Nationalization of Mexican Oil: A Reinterpretation.” The Journal of American History 69.1, June (1982), pp. 62-81. Lida, Clara E. Inmigración y exilio. Ciudad de México: Siglo XXI, 1997. Meyer, Lorenzo. “Calles vs. Calles. El ‘jefe máximo’ con la República, el exiliado con Franco. Contradicciones de la élite revolucionaria mexicana.” Historia Mexicana 58.3, Jan.-Mar. (2009), pp. 1005-1044. — México y Estados Unidos en el conflicto petrolero (1917-1942). Ciudad de México: El Colegio de México, 1972. Offner, Arnold A. American Appeasement: United States Foreign Policy and Germany, 1933-1938. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969. “Our Recognition of Franco Scored.” The New York Times, 2 Apr. (1939), p. 34. Rosenweig Díaz to Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, Panama, 21 June 1940, Archivo Histórico Genaro Estrada, III-2934-15. Sumner Welles to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Washington D.C., 26 Apr. 1937, PSF: Ciudad de México: TS, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Foreign Affairs 5. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1980, pp. 111-117. Stuhler, Barbara. “The One Man Who Voted ‘Nay’: The Story of John T. Bernard’s Quarrel with American Foreign Policy, 19371939.” Minnesota History 43.3, Fall (1972), pp. 82-92. “Telegrams given to Roosevelt by Fernando de los Ríos,” Washington D.C., 8 June 1937, PSF: Spain: T. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Foreign Affairs 5. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1980, pp. 346-348.

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Tierney, Dominic. “Franklin D. Roosevelt and Covert Aid to the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-39.” Journal of Contemporary History 39.3, Jul. (2004), pp. 299-313. Tilson, John Q. The Embargo on Spain. The author, 1939. Traina, Richard P. American Diplomacy and the Spanish Civil War. Indiannapolis: Indiana University Press, 1968. Whealey, Robert. “How Franco Financed his War – Reconsidered.” Journal of Contemporary History 12.1, Jan. (1977), p. 139.

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USA Hispanic Women Fighting Fascist Spain: Print Culture and Activism Montse Feu Sam Houston State University

Through their activism and print culture, USA Hispanic workers’ associations and mutual aid societies affiliated with the Sociedades Hispanas Confederadas (SHC) were one of the antifascists hubs during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the Francisco Franco dictatorship (1939-1975). Like other ethnic worker antifascist movements in the United States, SHC developed transnational proletarian cultures and networks with customary mutual aid that included the sharing with other grassroots organizations of (1) headquarters, (2) subscribers to their periodicals and membership, and (3) volunteering performers for their fundraisers.1 This proletarian antifascism developed from local, earlier migrant and exiled work-

1

See Donna Gabaccia’s scholarship on the agency of migrants and their capacity for mobilization.

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ers from Europe and Latin America brought a deep-seated workingclass identity and radical ideologies that linked them beyond national boundaries.2 SHC fundraisers were advertised and reviewed in USA Hispanic periodicals, which consolidated Hispanic antifascism and culture.3 Women workers were highly involved in fundraisers, boycotts, refugee activism and antifascist writing. Despite the limitations imposed on them by both the patriarchal exile and USA context they inhabited, women were effective activists. They leaned on and built networks consisting of overlapping exile, ethnic, radical, labor, and personal relations. This chapter features several SHC women in the context of USA Hispanic antifascist print culture. Their scattered records show gaps that cannot always be pieced together; however, women’s activism, even if only in short biographical sketches, can be recognized, made available, and help us think about how antifascism culture was built and how it has been historicized. They contributed on the stage (Mary Reid, María Cordellat), boycotting fascist products (Violeta Miqueli), through refugee activism (Cordellat, Nancy MacDonald, Carmen Aldecoa), and by promoting and writing about workers’ political thought (Aldecoa, Ernestina González, Carmen Meana, Miqueli, Federica Montseny). Building on Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein’s Data Feminism (2019), the humanities digital project Fighting Fascist Spain-The Exibits has the goal of making their legacy available and contextualized.4

2

In particular, El Antifascista (1938-1939) and Ariel (1939) in Los Angeles, La Gaceta (1922-) in Tampa, Ambos Mundos (1946), Ecos de Nueva York (19501957), La Prensa (1913-1963), Vía Libre (1939-1940), La Voz (1937-1939), Cultura Proletaria (New York). 3 See Nicolas Kanellos and Janet L. Sturman on USA Hispanic theatre and Reid’s stardom in the 1920s and 1930s. 4 The exhibit curates and makes available visual evidence about the many facets of their antifascist activism and writing featured in this chapter. The open-source repository Omeka also allows for dynamic future interpretations. Please see https://montsefeu.wixsite.com/montsefeu/copy-of-ffs-theexhibits.

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Mary Reid (1895-1980s) One of the overlapping networks supporting worker antifascism was the thriving USA Hispanic theatre scene, in turn supported by earlier labor and worker cultural associations.5 SHC Antifascist theater was extremely successful in community building and fundraising. Women workers performed in hundreds of SHC fundraisers from the 1930s to the 1950s. Plays and other performing arts attracted numerous participants and raised thousands of dollars across the United States in the affiliated organizations and with traveling troupes. The shipment of ambulances, medicines, clothes, and other goods to Spain during the war and to exiles in France during the dictatorship were paid for by the funds raised. Also, collections financed the relocation of refugees and the undercover resistance in Spain. Antifascist plays, performed in workers and migrants’ diverse political, social, and cultural associations, preserved proletarian culture. Mary Reid was crucial to the success of the SHC stage thanks to her stardom in USA Hispanic theatre.6 In 1936, Reid became a member of the SHC Committee de Fiestas (Fundraisers Committee) and was a generous donor for the publication of the SHC periodicals throughout their existence. Over the years, Reid directed 27 SHC plays, co-directed two, was the Master of Ceremonies of seven fundraisers, wrote one original play, and performed as actress in 46 (See

5 6

See Nicolas Kanellos and Janet L. Sturman on USA Hispanic theatre and Reid’s stardom in the 1920s and 1930s. From Gibraltar, Iberia, Reid formed her own company, Compañía Marita Reid and played in mutual aid societies of Spaniards, Cubans, and Puerto Ricans, including the Ateneo Hispano before the Spanish Civil War. She performed in a variety of genres, ranging from drama to the zarzuela. Reid made her New York stage debut with La Compañía de Teatro Español (Spanish Theater Company). In the 1950s and 1960s, Reid performed in some English-language plays on Broadway and television. She also had a part in the movie Crowded Paradise, produced in Puerto Rico. Reid also mentored other Latina performers such as Tina Ramírez, director of Ballet Hispánico.

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appendix 1 for more information).7 España Libre editor and contributor Aurelio Pego wrote an eulogy to Reid: “Franco has a formidable enemy in Mary Reid [. . .] The anti-Franco fight owes much to her, but the Spanish theatre owes her at least as much [. . .] the most famous authors of the last and present century have been known in New York thanks to Mary Reid and her friends, who have truthfully performed their most popular plays” (17 Feb. 1948).8 Antifascist and género chico plays functioned as a catalyst for political consciousness, and their vindication of comedy and farce ridiculed fascist myths of power and perfection, while avoiding another dogmatic movement that reproduced fascistic worldviews.

María Cordellat (1897-1959) Like Reid, other established performers became part of the SHC executive committee. Cuban American María Cordellat and her husband, Valencian baritone Vicente Cordellat (1893-1956), regularly performed on the SHC stage along with Reid: María played the piano and Vicente sang. The Cordellats greatly contributed to raising funds and helped pay the rent for the SHC headquarters. Beyond fundraising, María Cordellat excelled in her role as the SHC secretary. The SHC received numerous petitions for help from refugees, because of the transnational reach of the SHC periodical España Libre (1939-1977 New York) and its clandestine infiltration in Spain. Cordellat aided refugees, leaning on several SHC networks to both hear about and help the refugees. She (1) contacted Immigration Detention Centers and the Department of Justice to inquire about Spanish refugees, (2) visited detainees, (3) found ways for the ships’ insurance to pay for the fares of transship to safe countries for arriving stowaways, (4) sought needed funds asking other aid organizations, (4) informed lawyers and assisted with the paperwork, (5) corre-

7 8

For a full list of performers, see Feu, Fighting Fascist Spain (2020). Quotes have been translated by Montse Feu.

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sponded with North American Government officials, and (6) provided much-needed answers to relatives seeking information about their family members.9 Pego lauded Cordellat’s refugee activism: All of this work requires many steps, many efforts, and getting many negative responses [. . .] [Cordellat] handles the cases of Spanish deportees and succeeds in sending them to a country in our America before they are deported to the prison that is now Spain [. . .] María Cordellat hasn’t yet been paid the tribute she deserves. I hope it doesn’t take long to pay her back. Nobody would deserve it more than her (Pego, 4 June 1948).

Thanks to her systematic interventions described above, Cordellat provided needed assistance to hundreds of refugees over decades of activism.

Ernestina González Rodríguez de Fleischman (1899-1976) and Carmen Meana (1907-unknown) In the gendered approach of SHC periodicals, women were portrayed as “pillars” of the USA antifascist effort by men writers for their assumed capacity to provide and care for victims. There were several women committees that were exceptionally active (see appendix 2). In one of the many initiatives, the Comités Femeninos Unidos intensively collected for three months helping the North American Committee and the Medical Bureau fill the ship Erica Reed with clothes and food to aid Spain (“Rumbo a España” Nov. 4, 1938). Although their activism fulfilled the gendered expectation, women also acted in their roles as workers, USA residents, and consumers. Women delegates attended the SHC yearly national congresses, rallied and demonstrated in USA streets, and boycotted and picketed pro-Fascist businesses. Worker periodicals covered their demonstrations in front of the Italian, Ger9

She visited Ellis Island twice a week. She was known there as the “Spanish Mother” (“María está enferma” 11 Nov. 1949). For more details on her activism see Feu, Fighting Fascist Spain (2020), 91-94.

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man, English, and Spanish consulates. In 1938, women led the demonstrations in front of the British Consulate in New York (“Nuestro piquete en el consulado británico”). The same year, the impressive number of 2,500 women demonstrated in Washington against the arms embargo during the Spanish Civil War (“Inquietudes” Apr. 8, 1938). On May 7, 1937, for example, hundreds of women protested on the streets of Tampa against the bombing of Guernica, Spain and demanding the lifting of the arms embargo (Varela-Lago 12). The Spanish and American Popular Fronts brought speakers together. In December 1937, Communist Ernestina González Rodríguez (also Ernestina Fleischman), a Madrid librarian, called women to action in an antifascist rally along anarchists Serafín Aliaga and Juan López, and Ralph Bates in the Webster Hall, New York (“Grandioso Mitin”).10 After the Spanish Civil War, the Franco’s regime started proceedings against her and her sister, María Luísa, who fled to URSS (Portal de Archivos Españoles). In late 1939, González de Fleischman left the SHC, served as secretary of the antifascist periodical Liberación (New York), and became member of the executive member of Refugee Relief Committee. With Helen R. Bryan, she was imprisoned for three months and paid a $500 fine because they refused to provide the records of the Joint Antifascist Refugee Committee to the House Committee on Un-American Activities in November 1950 (“Ingresaron en prisión” Nov. 17, 1950). When asked if she would permit the HCUA to see the records, González de Fleischman answered that the question was not pertinent since she did not personally possess the records of the JARC (United States v. Fleischman, 339 USA 349 [1950]). Possibly because both sisters were students of Miguel de Unamuno in Spain, Ernestine left instructions in her will to constitute the Leo Fleischman and Ernestina González Rodriguez Foundation in Madrid for the study of scientific ideas that provided scholarships for university students (“Dos bibliotecarias” BOE, Dec. 31, 1990). Prominent Spanish women politicians were invited as speakers to the SHC rallies. For example, Margarita Nelken was invited to speak

10 In 1932, she married Leo E. Fleischman, who died in combat in Spain in 1936.

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in a rally in Centro Galicia, New York on Sept. 19, 1938. The Socialist politician, feminist and writer remembered the Spanish people, who fought to stop Fascism and continued to do so (“Nuestros mitins” Sept. 23, 1938).11 The SHC printed 3,000 flyers and paid radio announcements to promote the event. Gloria González, secretary de Comités Femeninos Unidos, opened the fundraiser and collected $462.23 from the audience.12 Carmen Meana, who was secretary of the Madrid transportation Workers Union, feminist, and social worker, also talked. In 1936, Meana also spoke at several rallies and events in Madrid representing the Communist Party. She arrived with Ramón Sender from Spain for an antifascist tour in the USA in April 1938 (“Piden auxilio para España” Apr. 8, 1938). On June 10, Meana spoke next to Ramón Sender in front of 22,000 attendees (“Congreso Nacional de SHC” Nov. 25, 1938). She was also a writer and business manager for Liberación in the 1940s. Meana became a common speaker at SHC rallies and congresses as well as the ones organized by the periodical Liberación, often next to Puerto Rican leader Jesús Colón. She left for Cuba in 1953. Since the 1920s, Frederica Montseny’s original texts and reprints were often published in USA workers’ periodicals, for instance in Cultura Proletaria, Inquietudes, Vía Libre (New York), and Boletín del Torcedor (Tampa). Republican Minister of Health and Social Policy Montseny’s call for ambulances and condensed milk was published in Frente Popular on May 1, 1937. The SHC fundraised and sent hundreds of cans of milk among other goods to Spain, along with a total of eight ambulances to the Red Cross in Spain in less than a year. She was invited to speak from Spain at an event in Madison Square Garden on July 10, 1937. She talked along Dolores de Ibárruri, and other notable personalities

11 Diplomat and journalist Isabel de Palencia also gave a talk at the SHC fundraiser in the Palm Garden of New York City, May 14, 1944. She remembered the refugees and thanked Mexico for welcoming them. The event included other renowned speakers, an antifascist play, and performers. It collected $1,229.10 (“Sociedades Hispanas Confederadas celebró con gran entusiasmo el 14 de abril”). 12 In 1938 and 1939, Gloria González and Ernestina González de Fleischman often talked in events about the Spanish Civil War, were Masters of Ceremonies, and were in charge of the collections.

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(“Monumental Acto” Jul. 19, 1937). La Voz (New York) published her call to action addressed to American women on January 1, 1938.13 In 1939, Montseny addressed the Catalans in Cultura Proletaria because “The American liberal and anarchist movement are full of Catalan names” whose ancestors travelled to the continent “taking with them their thirst of justice, their heroic takes on life, their disobedience” (“Catalanes en América y en España” Jan. 21, 1939). On April 1940, SHC invited her as speaker to the commemorations of the Spanish Republic. Exiled in France, she was unable to travel because of visa restrictions. Some of her original articles, about anarchism and labor issues around the world, appeared in España Libre in the 1960s. Montseny also remembered the victims of Franco in her article “Réquiem por un millón de muertos.” For her, it was a collective death “Those who died defending workers’ freedom [. . .] died 1000 deaths. They saw their friends, their children, their women, their mothers die, to only die after those 1000 sorrows worse than death itself.” She asked readers to never forget their sacrifice and keep fighting for freedom, “The ideal, the trust in men, the hope for tomorrow that sustained them to their last breath, will sustain us in our own fight that we cannot stop until we succeed in the cause for which they died” (Sept. 6, 1963).

Violeta Miqueli Mayoz de González (1891-1972) Along with the anarchist networks, the USA Hispanic print culture also brought women together. Regular announcements were published in Frente Popular and España Libre to boycott products from fascist

13 The “Página de la mujer” in La Voz published women authors on antifascism and reprinted essays from Mujeres Libres (Barcelona). In her digital project “Feminismo y antifascismo en la ‘Página de la mujer’ del periódico neoyorquino La Voz” (1938), Ana María Díaz-Marcos also features Mexican activist María del Refugio “Cuca” García’s speech against Fascism in the first SHC National Congress in Pittsburg in 1937. The review was most surely written by Francisco Pérez Vega, representing La Voz and in attendance. See Ana María Díaz-Marcos’s digital project in Recovering the USA Hispanic Literary Heritage Digital Collections.

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countries and picket businesses that were selling them “milking the Fascist hyena.”14 Florida-born Violeta Miqueli Mayoz de González (18911972) was one of the leaders of boycotts.15 Miqueli, who also performed as an amateur actress for the SHC fundraisers, was a common contributor of Cuban and USA Hispanic periodicals since the 1910s. She wrote about women’s news, feminism, and labor issues in numerous periodicals, among them Cuba Cubana, El Arte, Anagrama, ¡Despertad! El Hogar, El Internacional, Postal de Key West, El Centinela, El Popular, and Pinos Nuevos, all of them published in Key West.16 Nueva Vida (New Life) in the 1920s (YBOR CITY). She also published in Cultura Proletaria and España Libre (New York), La Revista Blanca (Valencia), and La Prensa (Buenos Aires). In 1962 Miqueli published Women in Myth and History, which examines the roles of women in history. In a call to action to mothers in España Libre on March 15, 1940, Miqueli addressed “Spanish, Czechoslovakian, Polish, and Finnish mothers, all mothers who have suffered the horror of seeing their children torn apart by the bullets of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and Stalin” (“Distintas clases de antifascistas” Mar. 15, 1940). Miqueli addressed the SHC’s goal of involving workers in the antifascist fight: “Women can do a lot of good when we ignore the conventions of bourgeois society and accept the responsibility of our destiny as the vanguard of the people” (“Distintas clases de antifascistas” Mar. 15, 1940). Because of her advocacy, España Libre published several announcements encouraging the boycott of products from Fascist Spain. Consequently, SCH members often demonstrated and picketed shops that sold products from fascist countries.

14 A list of these businesses was published in Frente Popular on 8 Apr. 1938: Exporters: Emilio González, Julio Rojo Fabián, Ramón Garrido, Policarpo Gómez; shops owners: Carmen Moneo, Casa Vittori, La bodega de Paco, Juan Gallego, García y Díaz, Doctor Castro Viejo, Moure, Torres Perona, Juan B. Castro, Maximo Calvo, Lagueras, Alonso, Joaquin Quirons, Ulloa; Performers and empresarios: Hermanos Iturbi, Andrés Segovia, Benito Collada. 15 Miqueli’s parents were cigar-rolling workers in Ybor City. She obtained a master’s degree in education and taught in Tampa and Key West. 16 I thank his grandson Tomás González for sharing with me his family archive.

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Miqueli also wrote about antifascism and anarchism in Cultura Proletaria in the 1930s and 1940s, from a global perspective. Worker periodicals often alerted on the intervention of Fascist Italy in pre-war Spain, and so did Miqueli, “Il Popolo, Italian newspaper, regularly and shamelessly published irrefutable evidence of the official Italian meddling in Spain” (“Lo que dijo Bernard Fay” June 29, 1940). Miqueli reminded readers that in 1937 the British Foreign Secretary endorsed the increased trade in the Franco’s zone, and his words were, according to Miqueli, “a magnificent example of what patriotism means for bankers, the aristocracy, and the privileged —namely international military cooperation with Nazi-fascism to exterminate the European workers’ hopes” (“Lo que dijo Bernard Fay” June 29, 1940). Miqueli also examined how the Second Republic had intended to change the Spanish agricultural oligarchy and in doing so provide workers with proper working conditions. She denounced the defense of the “grandes de España” and their privileges as a state crime (“La aristocracia y el militarismo en España” Apr. 15, 1939). Her articles also documented how workers were resisting Fascism. In this respect, she reported the arrival of the delegates of Solidaridad Internacional Antifascista, Serafin Aliaga and Félix Martí Ibáñez, at the Second World Youth Congress held in New York (“Félix Martí Ibáñez” Aug. 13, 1938). The Congress invited “500 delegates from 52 countries, and 18 international organizations, representing more than 40 million young people all over the world” to discuss political, economic, social, and religious needs and ways to cooperate for world peace (Yoffe 3). Miqueli zealously argued that eliminating Fascism was not enough: it was necessary to establish a new society, but she blamed “the world’s workers’ thoughtfulness” and “the unspeakable cowardness of intellectuals, who ingratiate themselves with this immoral society” (“La verdad no se viste” Mar. 2, 1940). She stated that both the state and Fascism oppressed workers, who: had neither certainty, nor tranquility, nor sustenance, nor life in this valley of irresponsible, vain and cowardly people. Nothing protects us, nor the laws of the state, nor the unconditional brotherhood of the workers of the world. The state calls us “outlaws” and the unwise look at us with

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pity, because we do not want to dig into the mess of social pestilences. (“La verdad no se viste” Mar. 2, 1940)

In her 1940s essays, Miqueli criticized the state democracies for using the common people to attain power and then use power to keep the privileges of the powerful. She referred to workers who helped President Harry S. Truman to get to power as “modern slaves” (“Aspectos Sociales” Mar. 5, 1949).

Carmen Aldecoa (1904-1988) The anarchist and exile networks brought Asturian Carmen Aldecoa to New York in 1940. She in turn supported thousands of refugees, recovered workers’ print culture, and engaged readers in rearticulating the meaning of revolution after the Spanish Civil War. Aldecoa often gave speeches at workers’ associations and SHC events and cooperated with several aid initiatives in the United States throughout their existence to support political refugees, as for instance Spanish Refugee Aid (SRA), which raised over $5 million and aided 5,500 cases. Anarchist Nancy Macdonald (1910-1996) was the leading figure of the SRA and closely collaborated with Aldecoa and SHC. Both organizations shared their membership lists, executive committee members attended each organizations’ meetings. SRA lawyers helped the SHC refugee deportation cases, and the SHC networks offered assistance to exiles in France. In 1987, Macdonald published her book, Homage to the Spanish Exiles: Voices from the Spanish Civil War (1987), based on taped interviews and thus disseminating the otherwise silenced voices of the victims of Fascism exiled in France. Aldecoa was a recovery scholar who made sure to document anarchist and worker contributions. Aldecoa and her husband the anarcho-syndicalist Jesús González Malo established a close friendship with the Rocker family. In the exile periodical España Libre in Toulouse, Aldecoa made sure to recognize Milly Witcop, Jewish anarchosyndicalist, feminist, writer and activist, and companion of anarchosyndicalist and German exile Rudolf Rocker in the front page of the

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April 22, 1956 issue. For the patriarchal expectations of the time, Aldecoa presents Milly as the passionate complement to Rocker, the thinker. However, when the article continues in the inside pages, the tone clearly changes. Her last sentence reclaims Witcop as the creator of Rocker: “Milly Witcop, the fragile and pale girl; all feeling and commitment, has given us Rodolfo Rocker!” (Aldecoa Apr. 22, 1956). A year later, Aldecoa published Del sentir y pensar. Libro primero (1957) in Mexico with the exile editor Bartomeu Costa Amic.17 In her manuscript, Aldecoa criticizes elitist and colonialist perspectives that disregard the historical contributions of common people to society. Aldecoa noted that the workers’ revolution started in Spain when workers discussed anarchist and socialist authors and thinkers in workers’ newspapers, associations, and schools. In her recognition of the success of Spanish labor and print networks before the First International of 1864, Aldecoa cited The First International in Spain (1868-1888) by Renée Lamberet, French anarchist historian and Max Nettlau’s collaborator (Aldecoa, Del sentir y pensar 115). Also, Aldecoa credited the proletarian print culture in pre-Spanish Civil War labor periodicals. The author counted 582 newspapers from 1869 to 1936 and highlighted the role of periodicals in serializing publications and translating of books, and, in doing so, educating the people. Aldecoa expressed her concern that such periodicals were not being preserved and thus the historical legacy of workers was being lost. She lamented that such authors were not to be found in anthologies of Spanish literature (Aldecoa, Del sentir y pensar 183). Therefore, Aldecoa invited scholars to consult the archive and carefully examine workers’ journalism of the era. For Aldecoa, anarchist newspapers continued to promote “emancipatory ideas and human dignity” in exile and she mentioned the more than fifty periodicals

17 The compilation included her articles in El Diario Montañés (Santander, 1936), España Libre (New York, 1940), España Libre (Toulouse 1941, 1955), and La Prensa (New York, 1951), as well as unpublished material. Aldecoa published two conferences about the Spanish labor movement given at Columbia University in 1952 and 1956. Not collected in this manuscript are her signed essays in exile periodicals such as El correo de Asturias (Buenos Aires, 1941), and ¡Ayuda! (Cuba, 1937). Aldecoa was not able to write the second and third volume for health reasons.

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written by the Spanish Civil War exiles (Aldecoa, Del sentir y pensar 125-127). Aldecoa praised how España Libre fought Fascism; but she stressed the need to define exile beyond a solely antifascist identity.18 Similarly to Miqueli, Aldecoa asked Anarchists in exile to surpass a simply reactive project against Fascism, and to construct a free world.

Conclusions Along with affiliated associations, theater groups, rallies, and demonstrations, workers’ periodicals provided public spaces of protest and solidarity in the United States. Although worker periodicals had few articles by women and not many photos of antifascist women, in closely reading these periodicals, women are indeed agents of change and built an antifascist future beyond the domestic sphere attributed to them by these publications. Women became executive members of fundraising committees, occupied USA streets with demonstrations, picketed and boycotted products from Fascist countries, and showed their political and consumer power. Leaning on overlapping ethnic, labor, and antifascist networks, women found ways to exercise their activism beyond the patriarchal expectations of their time. Reid’s dedication to theatre and to antifascism created a culture of participation in solidarity with the victims of Franco, branded working-class identity, and raised funds for Spaniards suffering in Franco’s Spain. Although Reid was awarded the Medal of Dama de la Orden de la Liberación in 1957 by the Government of the Second Spanish Republic in exile (“Recuerdo de la defensa de Madrid y del octubre asturiano” Dec. 6, 1957), her antifascist contributions have not yet gained the broad recognition that other Spanish actresses in exile have achieved, such as María Casares or Margarita Xirgu. Refugee activism was the prime SHC antifascist activity, since it recognized freedom fighters’ physical contestation of Fascism. Cordellat communicated with American, Latin American, and undercover agents

18 Aldecoa served as editor of España Libre for a few months in 1965.

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and saved hundreds of refugees. When exploring women committees, stories of loyalty and lost are always prevalent. González de Fleischman spent decades away from her sister and was imprisoned because she protected other activists. Similarly, Aldecoa built lifelong friendships with anarchist Nancy Macdonald and Milly Witcop Rocker. With them, she supported refugees in France and wrote about labor print culture and anarchism. By writing about workers’ thought and politics and issuing calls to action to SHC women, Aldecoa, Meana, Miqueli, and Montseny kept antifascism thriving among workers in the United States until the 1960s, which provided much hope for a free future. In the context of the transition to democracy in Spain, the Cold War years in the United States, and the elitism of academia everywhere, antifascist women activists and their legacy have suffered patriarchy, exile, the political persecution of their radical ideas, and the disregard of their denunciations of the civil right infringements in Spain.19 Today, their antifascist labor, their migrant and local networks, their published ideas and actions, the contextualized images collected freely available at Fighting Fascist Spain–The Exhibits, and the future online connections and collaborations, challenge this oblivion and take back the power of their life commitment to freedom and their capacity for implementing revolutionary strategies to fight Fascism.

19 The transition to democracy in Spain avoided transitional justice and an amnesty law was passed for those who repressed the population, and freedom fighters were indeed forgotten. The grassroot movement Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (2000) is fighting for the implementation of the international principles of justice, truth, reparation, and guarantees of non-recurrence. However, state policy maintains the impunity for the Franco’s regime crimes because the judicial, legislative and executive power crimes are not investigated. The Spanish parliament refused to change the amnesty law in 2018, thus judges do not follow up petitions by family members of those who were tortured, executed, or imprisoned. The executive power has not put forward any initiatives to change the amnesty law and has alerted the judges that they cannot collaborate with the Argentine judge Servini and her case for crimes against humanity in Franco’s Spain, violating international obligations of international law of human rights. Civil Society has issued petitions to the European Union, but the latter has not shown any political will to intervene in this issue.

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Appendix 1. Chronological Compilation of Mary Reid’s Roles in the SHC Stage Date/s Place/s (approximated)

Director/s Organizer/s Company/s

Author, Title Plot

Reid’s Role

4/21/1934 Ateneo Hispano Brooklyn

José Castilla Morales

SHC José Castilla Morales, La aparición de Ateneo. Music by Leopoldo González

ActressLibrarian

3/28/1937

Unknown

SHC José Castilla Morales, Ensayos breves de teatro popular. Includes ¡Abajo Franco! and Rebeldía. Music by Leopoldo González ¡Abajo Franco! A Spanish working-class married couple argue in New York. The man is an antifascist, but his wife claims that he acts superior toward her. They reconcile with a revolutionary song. Rebeldía A militiaman says goodbye to his girlfriend in Madrid. Ends with a revolutionary song.

Actress

6/20/1937 Unknown

Calpe American

SHC Sebastián Recio, El pueblo mártir

Director

6/20/1937 Unknown

Calpe American

SHC Mary Reid, Sor Piedad A wounded militiaman and a nun are executed. She was serving as a spy for the Republicans among the rebels.

Playwright Director

3/3/1938

Unknown

SHC J. C. Rivera, Los bizcochos de la Valencia Features the New York Valencia Bakery’s Sponge Cakes

Actress

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10/2/1938, Manhattan Center

Calpe American

SHC Leopoldo González, El cigarrillo

Actress

12/16/1938 Unknown

Comités Femeninos Unidos Calpe American

Carlos Arniches, La leyenda del monje (1890)

Actress

1/22/1939 OrganCentro Gali- izers Agrucia NYC pación de Mujeres Antifascistas (AMA) Calpe American

M.F. Caballero, Los africanistas (adaptation of El dúo de la Africana [1893])

Director

4/21/1939 Calpe America

Pedro Muñoz Seca and Pedro Pérez Fernández, Coba fina (1917)

Director

SHC Leopoldo González, El cigarrillo

Actress

5/28/1939 Centro Galicia

Ricardo Flores and Vicente Peydró, Las carceleras (1904)

Actress

Nov. 1939 Centro Español

SHC Ignacio Zugadi Garmendia, Volvieron los bárbaros [The Return of the Barbarians]

Actress

Álvarez Quintero, Serafín y Joaquín, Puebla de las mujeres

Director

10/2/1938, Manhattan Center 4/21/1939

3/8/1940 Centro Español

Calpe American

Calpe American

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3/17/1940 Centro Español

Calpe American Grupo Leonés

SHC Sebastián Recio, España unida Short play about how political ideas and regionalisms do not help the antifascist cause. Spain can be saved from fascism with the united people of Madrid, Galicia, Andalusia, Basque Country, Catalonia, and Valencia.

Director

3/22/1940 Centro Español

Antonio de la Villa Agrupación Socialista Española Grupo Vasco

Pedro Muñoz seca y Pedro Pérez Fernández, Un drama de Calderón

Actress Sra. Trujillo

5/11/1940 Calpe American

Unknown

Joaquín Abati Díaz, Entre doctores Direc(1892) tor Serafín Álvarez Quintero y Joaquín, MC Mañanita de sol (1915)

5/12/1940 Centro Español

Álvarez Quintero, Serafín y Joaquín, Solico en el mundo (1911)

Director

5/26/1940 Centro Español

Juventudes Gallegas

Carlos Arniches, La cara de Dios (1899)

Actress

11/17/1940 Palm Garden

Calpe American Sociedades Hispanas Confederadas

Alonso Gómez and Pedro Muñoz Seca, El contrabando (1905)

Director MC

12/20/1940 Palm Garden

Teatro del pueblo

Eugenio Selles, El rayo verde (1905)

Actress

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1/12/1941 Palm Garden

SHC Manuel Sugrañés, Paco, Benito y Adolfo: ¿Cuál de los tres es más golfo? Four-act skit, parody of Don Juan Tenorio. In the act “Objetivos militares” [“Military Objectives”], children who have been killed by Nazi bombs confront Hitler. He becomes terrified and regrets not having killed all the children in the world. Juan Eugenio Mingorance painted the set.

Actress

Paul Gavault, Tía Ramona (1917)

Actress

2/7/1941 Ateneo Hispano Brooklyn

Teatro del Pueblo

Feb., Mar. 1941 Ateneo Hispano Palm Garden Saint George Hall (Newark)

Frente Luis Fernández Ardavín, Doña Popular Diabla (1925) Antifascista Teatro del Pueblo

Actress

2/23/1941

Grupos Libertarios (SHC)

Benito Pérez Galdós, Doña Perfecta (1876)

Actress

Ricardo Flores and Vicente Peydró, Las carceleras (1904)

Actress

2/28/1941 Casa Galicia

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SHC José Castilla Morales, La Actress madre española Comic-dramatic entr’acte in two acts with twelve more acts. The topical two-act comic play dramatized the Spanish community in New York and their daily tribulations, including their listening to the SHC radio broadcast. Main acts: In “Esta noche no hay cena” [“There is no dinner tonight”], an aristocratic family in Madrid cannot get used to the food rationing in Spain. “La campanillera” [Andalusian singer and dancer of religious songs]; “La canción castellana” [“The Castillian song”]; “Trágala, trágala,” [“Swallow it”; “Ay, Carmela, Ay Carmela” [“Oh Carmela”]; “Vecinas, vecinas, aquí está el cartero,” [“Neighbors, neighbors, the postman is here”]. In this act, letters are read in Galician and in Italian. A symbolic vignette represents “La jota” [Spanish folk dance] Other acts: “La raza eterna” [“The eternal race”]; “La copla española” [“Spanish folk song”]; “Cascabeles” [“Bells”]. In “La tristeza de Andalucía” [“Andalusian sadness”], an Andalusian woman sings the sadness of seeing Andalusia without flowers after the war. “Epílogo” [“Epilogue”] “La madre española” [“The Spanish mother”].

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4/13/1941 Manhattan Center

SHC José Castilla Morales, La Actress República no ha muerto. Music by Esteban Roig Acts: “Prólogo” [“Prologue”] “Los romeros de la Albónica” [“The pilgrim from Albonica”] “Nobleza asturiana” [“Asturian nobility”] “Cuando el indiano volvió” [“When the Spanish American landowner returned”] “Sublevación de la Pilarica” [“The mutiny of the Pilarica”] “La Santa Espina” [“Catalan Sardana and National Hymn”] “La botica iluminada” [“Visionary remedy”] “El corte del farruco” [“The migrant’s cut”, farruco=migrant from Galicia or Asturias] “La colonia española” [“The Spanish community abroad”] “El Palleter” [“Vicente Doménech”] Epílogo: “¡Apoteosis!” [“Epilogue: Apotheosis!”] Miguel Mingote decorated the set.

4/6/1941 4/18/1941 Centro Asturiano

Comité José González de Iribarren, La A.M.A. partida de ajedrez (1878) Grupo Antifascista del Bronx

Actress

5/23/1941

Unknown

Event organizer MC

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Blanca Castejón, En este mundo traidor Jorge Orozco Castro, Germinal (1938)

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SHC José Castilla Morales, La panadera asturiana About the miners’ strikes in Asturias, Spain, in Oct. 1934. A maid is dishonored when her child is not recognized by the father, a young gentleman. She moves to a little town where she becomes an admired single mother and the town’s baker.

Actress

Actress

10/17/1941

Grupo España Libre

Antonio Ramos Martín, El sexo débil (1927)

5/15/1942 Newark, NJ

Unknown

(SHC) Manuel Sugrañes, Knock-out Actress Miguel de Cervantes, Los habladores (1881) Serafín y Joaquín Álvarez Quintero, El Chiquillo (1899) Joaquín Dicenta, Juan José (1895)

11/6/1942 Unknown Central Opera House

Leandro Navarro y Adolfo Torrado, Actress Mujeres madrileñas Reid personified the Spanish Republic.

Feb. / Mar., 1943 Palm Garden

Grupo SHC José Castilla Morales, Esta Antifascista noche no hay cena del Bronx Stand-alone act from his play La madre española. Set in Madrid, a well-off family cannot get used to the rationing in the city after the Spanish Civil War. SHC José Argibay, El testamento del muerto Play, María de la O

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Director Calpe American

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SHC José Castilla Morales, La villa inmortal Two-act comedy-drama about the fall of Madrid to the rebel forces during the Spanish Civil War. The clients of a hostel in the city exemplify different Spanish stereotypes.

Scene Director

3/24/1944 Unknown Casa Galicia

SHC Sebastián Palmer, La España peregrina Six-act tragedy about Spanish refugees in Santo Domingo.

Actress

3/31/1944 Ateneo Hispano Brooklyn

Unknown

Carlos Arniches, Las estrellas (1911) Actress

4/9/1944 Webster Hall

Unknown

Antonio Ramos Martín, La criatura (1920)

Actress

10/27/1944

Unknown

Pedro Pérez Fernández, Coba fina (1917)

Actress

12/1/1944 Palm Garden

Unknown

Serafín Álvarez Quintero and Joaquín Álvarez Quintero, El nuevo servidor (1905)

Actress

1/14/1945 Palm Garden

Calpe American

(SHC) J. Jiménez, El cuento del dragón

Director

1/26/1945 Palm Garden

Centro Español La Nacional Centro Asturiano

José Serrano, La dolorosa (1930)

Actress

10/26/1945

Unknown

Serafín Álvarez Quintero and Joaquín Álvarez Quintero, Así se escribe la historia (1917)

Director

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2/8/1946 Unknown Casa Galicia

Celso Lucio y Enrique García Gálvez, Marcha de Cádiz (1902). Music by Joaquín Valverde y Ramón Estelles

Actress

2/15/1946

Unknown

Vital Aza, El sueño dorado (1890)

Actress

5/10/1946

Unknown

Serafín Álvarez Quintero and Joaquín Álvarez Quintero, La malvaloca (1912)

Actress

Oct. 1946 Webster Hall, New York

Unknown

SHC José Castilla Morales, La familia de Don Cristóbal Columbus arrives in the Americas.

Actress

(SHC) J. Jiménez, El cuento del dragón

Director

Serafín Álvarez Quintero and Joaquín Álvarez Quintero, Doña hormiga (1930)

Actress

Emilio González del Castillo y José Muñoz Román, Las Leandras (1931). Music by Francisco Alonso.

Actress

1/11/1946 10/31/1947 Palm Garden

Unknown

2/13/1948

2/27/1948 Livingston Hall, New York

Palm Garden

José Castilla Morales, Los perActress digones. Music by Esteban Roig. Zarzuela about Andalusian customs, set in a country house in Andalusia. Alfred, the son of the marquis, is in love with María del Carmen, daughter of a worker. The marchioness and the house staff help the lovers. Alfred is accused of belonging to a resistance organization. It includes an elegy for Federico García Lorca.

5/28/1948

Compañía Mary Reid

Miguel Ramos Carrión, La muela del juicio (1902)

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Director

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10/8/1948 Palm Garden, NYC

Compañía Mary Reid

Emilio González del Castillo y DirecJosé Muñoz Román, Las Leandras tor (1931). Music by Francisco Alonso.

10/29/1948 Palm Garden, NYC

Compañía Mary Reid

Adolfo Torrado, Una gallega en Nueva York (1946)

Director

11/26/1948 Palm Garden, NYC

Compañía Mary Reid

Serafín Álvarez Quintero and Joaquín Álvarez Quintero, Amores y Amorío (1908)

Director

12/10/1948

Compañía Mary Reid

Serafín Álvarez Quintero and Joaquín Álvarez Quintero, La media naranja (1903) Serafín Álvarez Quintero and Joaquín Álvarez Quintero, Morritos (1906)

Director

12/12/1948

Unknown

SHC José Castilla Morales, ¡Ay qué tíos! [‘Oh These Guys!’]

Actress

1/14/1949

Unknown

Leandro Navarro y Adolfo Torrado, Los pellizcos: comedia en tres actos (1934)

Director

1/29/1949 Palm Garden

Unknown

Enrique Paradas and Joaquín Jiménez, Las corsarias (1919). Music by Francisco Alonso.

Director

3/23/1949 Palm Garden

Compañía Mary Reid

José de Echegaray, De la mala raza (1921) Music by Esteban Roig.

Actress Director

11/3/1950

España Libre

Antonio Ramos Martín, El sexo débil (1927)

Actress

1/28/1951

Unknown

Vital Aza, Las codornices (1889)

Actress

3/17/1956 La Nacional

Commemoration of the Second Republic.

MC

10/9/1956 Teatro Sala

Antonio Ramos Martín, El sexo débil Sainete

Actress Director

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USA Hispanic Women Fighting Fascist Spain 11/2/1956 Teatro Salon

Serafín Álvarez Quintero and Joaquín Álvarez Quintero, Los gavilanes (1924)

251 Actress Nata

4/14/1957 Mary Reid, Álvarez Quintero, El nuevo serviLa Nacional organizer dor (1905)

MC

4/18/1957 Opera House Newark NJ

Co-director

Daniel Morales, co-director

La pasión y la muerte de nuestro señor

5/17/1957 Casa Galicia

Hermanos Quintero, Lo que hablan Actress las mujeres (1932)

11/16/1957 La Nacional

Miguel Ramos Carrión, La real gana (1915)

Actress MC

3/7/1958 La Nacional

Vital Aza, La casa de los milagros

Director

3/7/1958

Fundraiser to help Valencia.

Organizer

3/21/1958

Flower Dance.

Organizer

4/4/1958 La Nacional

Vital Aza, La casa de los Milagros (1924)

Director

11/7/1958 La Nacional

Joaquín Abatí Díaz, Entre doctores (1892) Álvarez Quintero, Serafín y Joaquín, Serafín Álvarez Quintero y Joaquín, Mañanita de sol (1915)

Actress Director MC

4/18/1959

Commemoration Republic

Organizer

3/2/1961 Palm Garden

Calixto Navarro y Javier Govantes de Actress Lamadrid, La tela de araña (1882) José María Unzandizaga, Las golondrinas (1913) José María Unzandizaga, La llama (1918)

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Appendix 2. SHC-Affiliated Women Committees Agrupación de Mujeres Antifascistas (AMA), Bronx, New York, New York Club Femenino Español, Massillon, Ohio Comité de Damas de la Alianza Obrera Española, New York, New York Comisión de Damas del Comité Antifascista Español, Elizabeth, New Jersey Comité Femenino, Astoria, Queens, New York Comité Femenino, Niagara Falls, New York Comité Femenino, Schenectady, New York Comité Femenino, White Plains, New York Comité Femenino Auxiliar del S.A. Club, Bayonne, New Jersey Comité Femenino de Ayuda a España, East St. Louis, Illinois Comité Femenino de Brooklyn, New York, New York Comité Femenino Vasco, New York, New York Comités Femeninos Unidos de Nueva York, New York Damas Auxiliares del Spanish American Citizens Club, Bayonne, New Jersey Damas del Comité Español de Saten Island Grupo Femenino, Raysal, West Virginia Spanish American Women Club, Niagara Falls, New York

Works Cited Aldecoa, Carmen. “Milly Witcop-Rocker.” España Libre (Toulouse), 22 Apr. 1956. — Del pensar y del sentir. Libro primero. México: Costa-Amic, 1957. “Confederated Spanish Societies.” España Libre, 5 July 1963. “Congreso Nacional de SHC.” Frente Popular, 25 Nov. 1938. D’Ignazio, Catherine and Lauren F. Klein. Data Feminism. Cambridge: Massachussets Institute of Technology, 2019. Feu, Montse. Fighting Fascist Spain. Worker Protest from the Printing Press. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2020.

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Gallego Rubio, María Cristina. “Dos bibliotecarias complutenses en la Orden de Toledo de Luis Buñuel: las hermanas Ernestina y María Luisa González.” Biblioteca y sociedad, Universidad Complutense de Madrid. “Grandioso Mitin.” España Libre, 15 Dec. 1937. “Ingresaron en prisión.” España Libre, 17 Nov. 1950. “Inquietudes.” Frente Popular, 8 Apr. 1938. Kanellos, Nicolás. A History of Hispanic Theatre in the United States: Origins to 1940. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. “La conmemoración del 14 de abril.” España Libre, 23 Apr. 1954. “María está enferma.” España Libre, 11 Nov. 1949. “María Luisa González Rodríguez” (1900-1998). Portal de Archivos Españoles, pares.mcu.es. Miqueli, Violeta. “Félix Martí Ibáñez.” Cultura Proletaria, 13 Aug. 1938. — “La aristocracia y el militarismo en España.” Cultura Proletaria, 15 Apr. 1939. — “Distintas clases de antifascistas.” España Libre, 15 Mar. 1940. — “La verdad no se viste.” Cultura Proletaria, 2 Mar. 1940. — “Lo que dio Bernard Fay.” Cultura Proletaria, 29 June 1940. — “Aspectos Sociales.” Cultura Proletaria, 5 Mar. 1949. Montseny, Federica. “Catalanes en América y en España.” Cultura Proletaria, 21 Jan. 1939. — “Réquiem por un millón de muertos.” España Libre, 6 Sept. 1963. “Monumental Acto.” Frente Popular, 19 July 1937. “Nuestros mitins.” Frente Popular, 23 Sept. 1938. “Nuestro piquete en el consulado británico.” Frente Popular, 5 Aug. 1938. Otayek, Michel. “Keepsakes of the Revolution: Transnational Networks and the U.S. Circulation of Anarchist Propaganda During the Spanish Civil War.” Writing Revolution: Hispanic Anarchist Print Culture and the United States, edited by Chris Castañeda and Montse Feu, Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2019, 227-243. Pego, Aurelio. “A Heroine and the Ungrateful.” España Libre, 4 June 1948.

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— “Actress of the People.” España Libre, 17 Feb. 1948. “Piden auxilio para España.” El Continental, 8 Apr. 1938. “Recuerdo de la defensa de Madrid y del octubre asturiano.” España Libre, 6 Dec. 1957. Rey García, Marta. Stars for Spain: la Guerra Civil española en los Estados Unidos. Sada, Edicións do Castro, 1997. “Rumbo a España.” Frente Popular, 4 Nov. 1938. “Sociedades Hispanas Confederadas celebró con gran entusiasmo el 14 de abril,” España Libre, 21 Apr. 1944. Sociedades Hispanas Confederadas de Ayuda a España. Memoria del Congreso Nacional celebrado durante los días 6 y 7 de Noviembre de 1937 en la ciudad de Pittsburgh, Pa., U.S.A. New York: n.p., 1937. Sturman, Janet L. Zarzuela: Spanish Operetta, American Stage. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000. United States versus Fleischman, 339 USA 349 (1950). Varela-Lago, Ana. “¡No Pasarán! The Spanish Civil War’s Impact on Tampa’s Latin Community, 1936-1939.” Tampa Bay History 19.2 (1997), pp. 5-35. Yoffe, Isabelle. “The Second World Youth Congress.” Vassar Alumnae Magazine, Oct. 1938.

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France: A Stepping Stone toward the Americas

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The Spanish Republican Exile in Host Literatures, from France to the USA: A Transnational Approach1 Zoraida Carandell University Paris Nanterre

Luis Cernuda’s poem Díptico español reveals the inseparable link between the poet and his language, his true motherland: “I haven’t changed land / Because it is not possible for anyone for whom language is united / Until death, with the practice of poetry.”2 The reunion of Cernuda and the Spanish language in Mexico, after a few years

1

2

I would like to extend my sincere thanks to Sophie Masliah for her help in translating this paper into English, and José María Naharro-Calderón for his suggestions. Quotations in French and Spanish are translated into English for more clarity. No he cambiado de tierra,/ Porque no es posible a quien su lengua une,/Hasta la muerte, al menester de poesía.

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in the United States, gave rise to one of the most productive times for his poetical creation. The daily use of the language is probably one of the reasons for the intense creativity of the Spanish Republican exiles settling in Latin America. The common language has toned down what Francisco Ayala considered in his 1948 essay Para quién escribimos nosotros, as a major problem: the loss of influence of the Republican writers and intellectuals. This linguistic domination escaped neither the exiles nor travelers like Miguel Delibes, who in texts such as “Camino de Nueva York” and “Nueva York a vista de pez” ironically describes the differences between Spanish America and the Englishspeaking America in the 1960s (Usa y yo). Some of the Republican Spaniards settled in countries where Spanish was a foreign language and where their visibility was reduced compared to Mexico or Argentina: therefore they were not only exiles of a country but also exiles of a language. In the case of the United States and France, the language of the host country was also a dominant language in terms of knowledge, politics and institutions, and was spoken in several countries and continents, which made it even more difficult for these writers to gain recognition in the literary field. Enric Bou, Nuria Morgado, José María Naharro-Calderón, Mercedes Juliá and Ricardo F. Vivancos Pérez point out that most Spanish Republican writers did not speak English fluently enough to reach a public in the USA (Contra el olvido 31-123). They found themselves in what Dominique Maingueneau called “a situation of paratopy”: they belonged and did not belong to Spanish, French or USA literatures, and they didn’t have access to the public space they were part of in their country of origin. The study of the literary space of the Spanish exiles in France and the United States represents a reflection beforehand on the meaning of the literature on a worldwide scale. What Mari Paz Balibrea, in the wake of Max Aub, calls a “dismissed case” of the Republican literature (“El no lugar del exilio republicano”). It illustrates the lack of a literary space proper to the exiles, likely to constitute a reference to the eyes of their exile community. The struggle for recognition was all the more arduous for writers who found themselves in a miniature world, such as Paris: in the 50s and the 60s, Paris was still a big intellectual metropolis like some large cities on the East Coast of the United States.

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Talking about a “host literature”, in those conditions for France and the United States seems, at the beginning of the Republican exile, to be a bit optimistic. The analogy between the reception conditions between the two countries is reflected in a number of difficulties and questionings both from the point of view of the exile literature and the capital or dominating literatures, which, by assimilating peripheral literatures such as the exiled Spanish one, would take on an intellectual leadership. I can just suggest here a possible comparison and I refer to Olga Glondy’s La guerra fría cultural y el exilio republicano español, before focusing more especially on the French case. In the USA, institutions like Fundación del Amo or the Instituto de las Españas directed by Federico de Onís had a very significant role in the hosting of Spanish exiles (Niño). In France, the exiles looked into preserving the Republican culture mostly on two levels. They took part in a number of actions in the literary field, and which, thanks to individual or institutional initiatives, assure the survival of a culture and a community, in various forms such as: theatrical performances in Catalan in the Casals in the South of France; publishing houses and magazines such as Ruedo Ibérico; the creation of bookstores such as Jacinto Soriano’s La Librairie espagnole near the Seine; and the strong participation of the intellectual exiles in the academic world, which was also another similarity with the USA. The University of Maryland, in particular, distinguished itself through its hospitality. Hispanists contributed to the spread of exiles’ titles through translations, studies, and anthologies, that allowed the emergence of a canon of exile literature, presented as a Spanish literature counter-canon. It is all part of the same logic of resistance and preservation, both specific to the literary field of the Republican Spanish exile, which may be considered protectionist, but which finds its justification in the diminished and threatened situation of this type of literature. Among others, Sebastiaan Faber and Cristina Martínez Carazo point out the importance of recovering the Spanish Republican legacy, suspected in the 1950s and 1960s of being close to Communist ideas. In France, instead, the libération contributed to the prestige of Communist intellectuals such as Aragon or Éluard. Even though most Spanish Republicans did not benefit from this rehabilitation, their commitment

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found a relevant echo in the French literary field, so there is a significant difference between both exiles. We will distinguish the literary fields —which go from the academic to the editorial world and encompass the entire process of diffusion and transmission of literature, as studied in the monumental Diccionario biobibliográfico de los escritores, editoriales y revistas del exilio republicano de 1939, directed by Manuel Aznar Soler and José Ramón López García, from the literature itself as it is studied in this paper, and that we consider as system modeling of the universe of the exiles, a speculative language, a quest of meaning and a quest of aesthetics, particularly conducted in dedicated and canonical genres such as romantic fiction, theatre or poetry. Writing is preserving, it is thinking about a strategy: either the Spanish language is protected from the contamination of the French or English language by affirming the primacy of the language, in order to address a potential readership who remained in Spain, or you inform and raise awareness among a larger readership in the host country, and in that case, you use the language of the host country. Those two strategies may coexist: Américo Castro delivered lectures in English but still wrote in Spanish. Max Aub compensated his choice to write in another language than Spanish by having his work and that of other exiles’ translated into French. This was in order to provide them with visibility on an international scale, where these literatures were not credited at all through what Paul Valéry calls “spiritual value”, before Pierre Bourdieu talked in terms of cultural fund. The choice of the language, when writing, may depend also on historical opportunities: the end of World War II coincides with a strong engagement with exiles’ host literature, intended for the Western democracies’ judgement on Francoism, whereas the 60s display intense relationships with the opponents to Franco that were living in Spain, in anticipation of a Post-Franco area. The choice of strategies is sometimes involuntary, and depends on generational factors: those who were adults during the war and exile would be more willing to keep the Spanish language; teenagers or young children would become bilingual writers, such as Jorge Semprún or José Luis Villalonga, or even entirely francophone like Michel del Castillo. These same biographi-

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cal factors make periodization possible: one could thus distinguish between a literature of testimony (1940s and 1950s), and a literature of ideological analysis which, from the 1960s onwards, was the work of a contemporary generation known in Spain as “the children of war”, and which nourishes close links with the realistic novel from within Spain. Maryse Bertrand de Muñoz, author of a pioneering book published in 1972, La guerre civile espagnole et la littérature française, compares Canada exiled Jacques Folch Ribas’ main character in Le Greffon to Juan Goytisolo’s protagonist in Señas de identidad. We may also talk about a literature of inheritors, who, without having experienced the conflict, give an account of the family’s narrative. Second and third generation writers are perceived by French public opinion as having a double national affiliations, which forms a basis for their credibility and promotes their reception. A similar situation can be observed today in the United States, where it is not necessarily the work of the descendants of exiles: writers who studied and work in the USA such as Eduardo Lago and Ana Merino, winners of the Nadal Prize in 2006 and 2020, write in Spanish novels that take place in America (the middle west for Merino, New York in the case of Eduardo Lago). The life of Lago, for instance, at the crossroads of two cultures, constitutes a factor of legitimacy in the eyes of the readership of both literatures, which made more accessible the translation of his work into English (for example, Call me Brooklyn) and therefore its access to the English-speaking literary field. This ranking according to biographical criteria is not fully satisfying for a good reason: it would consider that the literature of Republican exile is only written by the exiles and for the exiles and it denies any legitimacy to the host literature as well as to the impact in the opinion of the host country. We maintain here that this literature is the result of an interaction between the original and the host literature. Therefore the impact of the biographical on the literary creation of the exile must be put into perspective. The proof is that despite a strong tendency towards testimony and autobiography, francophone literature devoted to exile may feature characters with no connection to the author. In L’Espagnol, Bernard Clavel introduces an idealist who has nothing to do with his own personal story. Rather than

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biographical criteria, the literature of exile meets thematic criteria, as Christiane Albert maintains: “the narrator / character has a particular relationship with writing since, through it, he begins to acquire a certain understanding of the situation of exclusion or marginality in which he finds himself ” (153). According to her, migrants’ literature is a response to a situation of exclusion from the dominant literary field, which she studies, like most theorists of literary migration such as Jean-Marc Moura, in the context of the French-speaking world. The literature of Republican exile in the USA and France are specific cases due to this change of language. How can the literature of the Republican Spanish exile be defined within a foreign country and literature? Is it defined through: the chosen language, in other words the choice of Spanish? The chosen theme, namely the evocation of exile, the consequences of the war? According to biographical criteria (do we need to be exiled or exiles’ descendants to be considered as stakeholders in this literature)? All the criteria listed are restrictive criteria, which partly overlap, but may not result in the same body of study. According to these criteria, we could include authors who have no biographical link with Spain but describe the consequences of the War on Exile. This would be the case of Spanish authors who do not address the question of exile but continue to write in Spanish, expressing a form of resistance —the language is experienced as a sort of fidelity by many exiles— or writers of Spanish origin who write in French. The corpus thus delimited is not a homogeneous whole. It has the merit of questioning the literature of exile’s boundaries, because all these criteria contribute, in a partial way, to defining a migrant literature, a term used by Pierre Nepveu in L’écologie du réel to designate the story of an experience related to immigration. The identity of the Republican exile’s literature is one of the most frequently debated issues in the exile community. What intellectuals on all sides emphasize is the importance of an exile attitude, which can be understood as a form of activism, a link shown by Eugenia Houvenaghel through the notion of agency: namely a form of attitude accompanied by an action (Escritoras españolas en el exilio mexicano: estrategias para la construcción de una identidad femenina). The idea of a

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national consciousness based on a number of values and actions is also promoted by Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez: “What is decisive is not being here or there, but the way of being” (165). This judgment, which seeks to bring together opponents from outside and those who have remained in Spain, applies both to those who write in Spanish and to those who believe it is necessary to adopt the language of the host country. The latter choice could be associated with a form of guilt, since the renunciation of the Spanish language has been assimilated to a form of defeatism. The idea that language is the bearer of a cultural identity is widely shared. For Max Aub, language is a way of thinking. In a radio interview with André Camp, transcribed by Gérard Malgat for an article in El correo de Euclides, Max Aub says: I think I do indeed speak French well enough —I say well enough— but I do not write well in French, I have never written anything literary in French, I could not do it. I don’t think at all, that my way of thinking is a French way of thinking. I would like to have the same clarity that the French generally have, when they write and when they think . . . But Spanish and the way of being Spanish, at least my way of being Spanish, which is the way of being of my generation —and that is what we’ll be talking about again— has marked me so strongly that it would be absolutely impossible for me to consider that I belong to the same line of French writers who correspond to ours in Spain. And, moreover, when you write in Spanish, when you think in Spanish, you write and think in a different way than when you think or write in French. Or even in Catalan. (qtd. in Malgat 107-114)

Max Aub associates personal identity with language, which is the result of an evolution, a history and a culture. When he says he is a Spanish writer and a Mexican citizen, he always gives priority to language. His conception of the writer as a craftsman of the language probably has to do with his own condition as a Mexican by adoption, which leads him to make Castilian a common thread in his creation. For language not to be considered as a transcendent horizon of the text, it took all the influence of structuralist criticism and deconstructionism. Jorge Semprún probably had to use all his strength

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of conviction to recreate a homeland and a moral territory in an acquired language: French. This led Semprún to assert vigorously: “my homeland is language: that is, a space of social communication, of linguistic invention: a possibility to represent the universe, to modify it, too, even in a minimal or marginal way, thanks to language” (qtd. in Balibrea, “El pensamiento sobre Europa” 53). The claim of this bilingual identity consists in saying that it is not of the order of the unspoken, or of the unexplainable. Just as there are canonical examples in Russian literature written partly in French, there are also works in Spanish literature written in whole or partly in languages foreign to the Peninsula. It is not possible to exclude absolutely that these works belong to Spanish literature, defined no longer as the literature of a language, but as a space of cultural construction. Therefore, the question is not whether a bilingual work belongs to a national literature, but whether it is relevant within that literature. This implies moving away from a patrimonial relationship to language and literature in order to understand a literature of exile. In La tesis de Nancy, Ramón Sender staged in 1962 the complex relationship between the Spanish and the Americans with their stereotypes, their language, and their national culture. The main character is an USA student who asks people in the street of Seville about Spanish grammar: it’s a symbol of the importance of language according to Ramón Sender. In Qu’est-ce qu’une littérature nationale. Écriture, identité, pouvoir en Espagne, Jacques Beyrie reflects on the relationship between writers and their mother tongue: The experience of recent decades has highlighted the reaction of writers such as Jorge Semprún or Agustín Gómez Arcos, for whom the use of a foreign language actually facilitates transgression. Apart from such cases, which are linked for the latter to particular political circumstances, we finally know the important role played by Latin in the past, by modern languages then, within the great system of intertextuality exchanges: all these books ‘translated or not’ become true matrices of new works. (Beyrie 217)

Writing is, after all, inventing a new language: the transition to French or English is only one of the avatars of the writer’s inven-

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tion, since according to Jacques Beyrie: “the writer ‘invents himself a custom-tailored language’ certainly cut essentially in the common language, but enriched with new meanings that he makes words produce, by integrating them to new contexts” (218). Writing in French is thus part of a collective project, which materializes in Semprún’s reflection in his writings about Europe, and which can be conceived as a way to reach a wider audience, at a time (the 1950s and 1960s) when Paris still had great prestige. Juan Benet recalls in Autumn in Madrid, around 1950: “new attractions were added after the war; on one hand, anti-Franco hospitality and the possibility of waging an ideological war against the dictatorship, and on the other hand, the furious and nocturnal modernity of existentialism which, finding no rivals, had to take over all academic non-conformism for a long time” (Otoño en Madrid hacia 1950 63). The results of this French “anti-Franco hospitality” appear today strongly balanced through the work of researchers looking at the concentration camps where the Spanish Republicans were held. But Paris, to Spanish intellectuals in the 1950s, seemed to be a place of freedom. The issue of what appears to be a cultural domination is still to be determined. The dominant-dominated cleavage could be expressed in different terms by the critics, as Pascale Casanova recalls in her introduction to Des littératures combatives. L’internationale des nationalismes littéraires: TS Eliot distinguishes in What is a classic? the mature literatures from the immature literatures; Marcel Mauss, the “completed” nations from the “unfinished”; Gilles Deleuze, the “minor” from the “major” literatures; Frederic Jameson the literatures of the “third world” and those of the “first world”, Franco Moretti, those of the “center”, the “periphery” and the “semi periphery”, and Pascale Casanova, the “dominant” and the “dominated” or “autonomous” and the “heteronomous”. Yet the distinction that seems most operational to her is the one between “combative” and “pacified”: “none seems to me, more convincing than the one opposing combative and pacified literatures (from the point of view of national claim) or, even better, non-claimant” (Casanova 19-32). his last dichotomy is particularly appropriate in the case of the Spanish Republican exile. These fluctuating opposition terms, used by Jameson,

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Moretti, Deleuze or Casanova, illustrate the shifting ground of literary identity construction, its variables and adjustments over time. They have in common that they advocate a postcolonial revision of literature such as the one Jean-Marc Moura defends concerning the French-speaking literature in Espace méditerranéen. Écritures de l’exil, migrances et discours postcolonial. To reflect the literature of the Spanish Republican exile, it is useful to cross-reference these terms in opposition. A transnational approach of the Spanish Republican exile literature is necessary, according to Naharro-Calderón. The writing of the Republican exile in a host literature whose language is the writers’ native language opens up new paths and makes it possible to approach Spanish literature from a transnational point of view as a literature in conflict: not only do the exiles defend values and a cultural project contrary to that promoted by Franco’s official Spain, but they also join a certain dissident literature from within, particularly the realistic novel of the 1960s. Both are implementing a dynamic of conflict and struggle for recognition. It is certainly because Spanish exile literature (in conflict with the “national” literature of Spain) exists through the realistic novel of Spain from within. And it has achieved the feat of being considered throughout the world as a major literature (Deleuze’s terms), even though these authors came from a semi-peripheral literature (a term used by Jameson), that of Franco’s Spain. The literature of the Republican exile and that of Franco’s internal dissent (what Manuel Aznar Soler called insilio after Grimberg and Peri Rossi’s terminology) are complementary, and in a way allied against a hegemonic and national conception of literature. As a result, Spanish-language literature in the 1950s and 1960s constituted a kind of anomaly in the literary landscape, as Spanish-speaking authors gained considerable importance even though they did not come from a dominant culture. On a larger scale, the boom in Latin America confirmed that the exception was possible; writers from politically and economically underrepresented countries gained major literary prestige. The literature of exile is anything but serene: born out of conflict, it deconstructs the identity of its protagonists, and calls into question literary canons. Its founding event is the Spanish Civil War, directly represented or as a

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watermark in the text. One of the relevant features of the novel of Spanish exile is to express the rupture and separation, the pain that derives from a break caused by geographical isolation and the impossible meeting with your loved ones. This leads the protagonists to the need to find their origins, as in Tanguy, by Michel del Castillo. This literature is combative because in order to exist, it must build itself, and find what José Angel Valente, after Mallarmé, calls “the words of the tribe” (Valente, Las palabras de la tribu).The construction of identity requires a reinvention of the nation and its symbols, sometimes misunderstood by the readers: when Cernuda highlights the heritage of the Escorial and the Golden Age, he is criticized. His attempt to reclaim cultural heritage is considered by some as a negative mirror of Franco’s nation. One of the contributions of a struggling literature to an established one could be precisely the force of protest. For readers of the latter to be able to assimilate a struggling literature, they must make it their own. Whatever the institutional strength and cultural weight of French literature, it was regularly called into question, which is essential to its vitality. Sectors of French opinion were able to embody their opposition force. Thus, during the Occupation and after the Liberation, the French Communist intellectuals maintained a relationship of opposition to a hegemonic French literature, and considered Spanish Republican literature as a model of civil resistance to Fascism. The publication in France of Romancero de la guerre civile by Georges Pillement in 1937 inspired the writings of Jean Cassou, Louis Parrot, Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard, who, like León Felipe, wondered what new song they would sing. A reader of the first part of Les communistes by Louis Aragon, where the retirada is described, and where the efforts of the French authorities to win the good graces of Franco are mocked, would find it difficult to distinguish this novel from that of a Spanish Republican. All over the world, writers who have contributed to the Republican cause have integrated war and exile as events that concern them in the first place, since they have been direct witnesses to them. Not only was the Spanish Civil War globalized by literature, but we may witness its assimilation by writers of a collective tragedy lived as if they were a part of it, because of universal and founding

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values in a transnational literature of protest, which castigated the role of Western democracies before and after the Second World War, when the Francoist State came out of its diplomatic isolation with its entry into the UN. The confrontation between struggling and established literature thus highlights the need for a periodization that takes into consideration both the host society and the exiled one. The interweaving of exile literature with a host literature is evident in events that galvanize public opinion and make a struggling literature necessary. The 1960s and especially the Algerian war and the events of 1968 caused a stir in French public opinion, which manifested itself in a questioning of authority and literary models. In Señas de identidad, Juan Goytisolo considers it necessary to converge the struggles to destabilize Francoism, the evocation of the Algerian war and the abuses committed by the French army alongside the description of the trains filled with Spaniards who flee the countryside void of industrialization and who will send their meagre savings to their families. Poverty is the result of political decisions, as Goytisolo affirms in his novel: the continuity between political exile and economic immigration. Jorge Semprún’s Algarabía mixes the evocation of the Spanish Civil War in May 68 and the barricades of the Paris Commune. This novel, whose title is a hispanism, weaves a fiction in 1968 through an invented language. The refusal of authority requires the rejection of the language of authority. Other forms of protest characterized the first decade of the 21st Century, marked on the economic level by a global crisis following the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. In Spain, the fallout of the 2007 Historical Memory Law is perceptible in the memory wave in literature; the anonymous and forgotten actors of history were finally reclaimed within the searches for their remains in mass graves. The French descendants of second or third generation exiles were also closely involved in this recovery of a Republican memory. Serge Mestre, who published Les plages du silence in 1991, rewrites his novel in 2013, in tribute to his father, a former soldier mutilated during the Spanish War. This book describes the atrocities of the camps, the cold and hunger, but also the discovery, by the detainees, of a new language: “The camp would henceforth shelter this war of

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the stomach which always followed the lost war: at least, it sheltered the birth of a landscape whose backdrop was this mouth was trying to articulate with difficulty the ‘r’, the ‘e’, the ‘I’ of the other language. “This is how a territory becomes a conscience” (39), explained a refugee. Pas pleurer, by Lydie Salvayre, awarded the Prix Goncourt in 2014, is a novel where French and Spanish merge. Many hispanisms dot the story, attributed to Montsè, the narrator’s mother. Her voice alternates with that of Bernanos, which puts on the same level a totally unknown woman, uneducated, who crossed the Pyrenees on foot, her child in her arms, and the authoritarian story by a writer haloed with glory. The voice is surrendered to the anonymous actors of History: the novel draws its strength both from the narrative of the Spanish War, as well as from Montsè’s condition as an exile, settled in Languedoc, since leaving the camp of Argelès. It is from this adopted home, in an alternative language within the host literature, that she expresses herself. Her existence in exile, briefly mentioned in the book, resembles an off-camera that gives the narrative its luminous violence as well as its depth and authenticity. Therefore, the history of Republican Spanish exile literature is that of a paradoxical effort: the more the writers adapt to the context and models that are important in the host literature, the better they dialogue with it, and the more they evolve in a literary space strongly stratified and hostile to differences. The more they innovate, the more they question the foundations of a host literature conceived as a national literature, the more they contribute to its renewal, and the more their work will be considered when national literatures take into account what the incoming models have brought to them. Cernuda describes this phenomenom in the poem ‘Lázaro’ as the lily of the valley, buried in its humble darkness. After a long wait, it finally appears in its white dress, at the dawn of Lázaro’s [the poet’s] triumph.

Works Cited Albert, Christiane. L’immigration dans le roman francophone contemporain. Paris: Karthala, 2005.

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Ayala, Francisco. “Para quién escribimos nosotros.” [1948]. Las literaturas del exilio republicano de 1939. Sevilla: Renacimiento, 2000, pp. 99-101. Aznar Soler, Manuel and López García, José R. Diccionario biobibliográfico de los escritores, editoriales y revistas del exilio republicano de 1939. 4 Vols. Sevilla: Renacimiento: 2017. Balibrea, Mari Paz. “El no lugar del exilio republicano: historiografía literaria y construcción de la nación.” Quimera 281 (2007), pp. 24-30. — “El pensamiento sobre Europa en la obra de Max Aub y Jorge Semprún.” El correo de Euclides. Anuario Científico de la Fundación Max Aub 9 (2014), pp. 51-68. Benet, Juan. Otoño en Madrid hacia 1950. Madrid: Visor, 2001. Bertrand de Muñoz, Maryse. La guerre civile espagnole et la littérature française. Montréal: Didier, 1972. Beyrie, Jacques. Qu’est-ce qu’une littérature nationale. Écriture, identité, pouvoir en Espagne. Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Miral, 1994. Casanova, Pascale. Des littératures combatives. L’internationale des nationalismes littéraires. Paris: Raisons d’agir, 2011. Delibes, Miguel. USA y yo. Barcelona: Destino, 1966. Glondys, Olga. La guerra fría cultural y el exilio republicano español. Madrid: CSIC, 2012. Faber, Sebastiaan and Martínez Carazo, Cristina. Contra el olvido. El exilio español en Estados Unidos, Alcalá de Henares: Instituto Benjamin Franklin/Universidad de Alcalá, 2010. Houvenaghel, Eugenia H. and Serlet, Florian. Escritoras españolas en el exilio mexicano: estrategias para la construcción de una identidad femenina. Ciudad de México: Porrúa, 2016. Maingueneau, Dominique. Trouver sa place dans le champ littéraire. Paratopie et création. Louvain-La-Neuve: Academia, pp. 5-21. Malgat, Gérard. “Pasando por París: las memorias radiofónicas de Max Aub (1961-1967).” El correo de Euclides. Anuario Científico de la Fundación Max Aub 9 (2014), pp. 107-114. Mestre, Serge. Les plages du silence. Paris: Sabine Wespieser éditeur, 2013.

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Moura, Jean-Marc. Espace méditerranéen. Ecritures de l’exil, migrances et discours postcolonial. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014. Naharro-Calderón, José M. “De exilios, interxilios y sus literaturas.” Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, 2007, Nepveu, Pierre. L’écologie du réel: mort et naissance de la littérature québécoise contemporaine. Montréal: Les éditions du Boréal, 1999. Niño, Antonio. “El exilio intelectual republicano en los Estados Unidos.” Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, 2016, Pillement, Georges. Romancero de la guerre civile. Paris: Éditions sociales internationales, 1937. Sánchez Vázquez, Adolfo. “Fin del exilio y exilio sin fin.” Renacimiento, no. 27-30, 2000, pp. 164-165.

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Keeping Spain’s Exiles in the Americas and Maryland: “Alive in our Hearts” (1939-1989-2019). Cultural Mexican Institute, Washington D.C., October 24, 2019.

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Film, Poetry and Music around the Spanish Refugees

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Portrayal of Displacement: A Spanish Civil War Film and the Propaganda Machine1 Anaïs Naharro-Murphy ENAensemble Artistic Director (enasemble.org)

We live in a world of refugees, from asylum seekers, to immigrants attempting to build a better life, to camps and shantytowns full of the forgotten. As events on phones and televisions are relayed around the world, we have become desensitized to images of displacement. Refugees are the norm rather than the exception of social-politicalenvironmental wars. The current “immigration debate” in the United States exemplifies the inhumanity that characterizes contemporary policies and discussion. Refugees who have gone through so much experience further 1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1IqiEpOopw.

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humiliation —family separation, a First Lady wearing “I don’t really care, do us?” at a detention camp for children. These are the reactions to a legitimate worldwide crisis.

Awaiting Refuge Originally created for the 2018 Fringe Festival piece The Propaganda Machine Show, and then presented within the 2019 Symposium, “Keeping 1939 Spain’s Exile in the Americas and Maryland: ‘Alive in our Hearts’ (1939-1989-2019,” this new musical score for Refuge looks back at one of the first major refugee crises in the world to be covered by “modern media” —the plight of Spanish Republicans in the late 1930s— by examining one of the first pieces of cinematic documentation of a humanitarian crisis. As Spanish Fascists prevailed in the bloody civil war, Republican refugees who fled their native soil were put in French concentration camps, imprisoned, and humiliated. Although the cause of the Republicans was not officially supported by any democratic country except Mexico, many citizens from around the world, including the United States, volunteered to fight in Spain as part of the International Brigades. However, once the Fascist regime was officially established at the end of the war in 1939, humanitarian efforts to help the Republican cause started to wane. In an attempt to convince the United States public that the Republicans still needed their support as the war was ending and thereafter, the New York Office of the Spanish Refugee Relief Campaign (SRRC), a subset of the North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy, prepared numerous projects. These included the feature film Refuge, a shortened and dubbed version of the documentary Un peuple attend (A People is Waiting) by French filmmaker Jean-Paul Le Chanois (alias Jean-Paul Dreyfus). The director did not manage to complete it before the end of the Spanish Civil War in order to shift public opinion about the arms embargo in the USA. This original version of the film combined original footage, newsreel, and later was completed including the first filmed images, subversively taken

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from a camera hidden in a grocery bag at the concentration camp of Argelès-sur-Mer. This shortened Refuge was intended as a means to raise funds and awareness for the Spanish Republican humanitarian consequences of displacement.

Jean-Paul Le Chanois, the Director of Refuge French director Le Chanois (he changed his name from Dreyfus —or Dreyfuss in German— to avoid persecution during World War II) made two documentary films about the plight of Spanish Republicans: Au secours du peuple catholique basque (Aid to the Catholic Basque People) in 1937 and Un peuple attend in 1939. Interviewed in the late 1980s, Le Chanois explained that his second film was banned by the French authorities because of its depiction of concentration camps.“I filmed the concentration camps of Argelès secretly, and as a Frenchman, the way men were treated on that beach still makes me feel ashamed,” Le Chanois said about his experiences filming in the south of France. Years later I met a girl whose mother had helped me transport my hidden camera under the vegetables she was carrying in her bag. The living conditions were dreadful: thousands of men guarded by Moroccans in February and March without food, shelter, or medical care. Later, I went to a hospital in Perpignan where men were left lying on the steps, or lying on the floor in the wards. I also visited the places where women and children were sent; it was the most hostile area in France and they were locked up in derelict farms or houses in ruins. The women sang the most heart-rending songs. (qtd. in Crusells, 232)

Although the negative of the longer film was destroyed by French authorities, members of the International Brigade were able to send a copy to the United States, where it was edited by Irving Lerner (in cooperation with the Franco-Communist company Ciné-Liberté), intended for North American audiences to spur relief efforts for Spanish Refugees in the wake of WWII. However, due to political disagreements within SRRC and the lack of support after the end of

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the Spanish Civil War, Refuge became the last large effort of the organization, which officially disbanded in 1940. The film went largely unseen. It was most likely shown in private or small meetings but never screened publicly. The seeds of the postwar Red Scare were already sown, as the democratic cause of Spanish Republicans became inextricably linked with its Soviet Communist benefactors in American eyes. When tactical support of communism and socialism was replaced by political fanaticism in the early days of the Cold War, Refuge and its cause were forgotten. In 2001, Spanish film historian Magí Crussels discovered a video copy of a film preserved in the Museum of Modern Art in New York that was catalogued in archives in Spain. After some research and an in-depth analysis of the particular copy, it was discovered that this film was mistitled Un peuple attend after the original longer documentary, but was indeed Refuge. The clips in this 27-minute edit are the only remnants of Le Chanois’s longer film. In 2009, Refuge received its first official public screening, 70 years after its original production.

An Historical Perspective The Propaganda Machine Show aims to deconstruct the subtle shades of propaganda via cinema, chamber opera, and cabaret, from the advent of film as a political tool in the 1930s, to the heart of Fascism in Europe in the 1940s, to “fake news” today. In the century of the refugee, we use the first modern media coverage of refugees as a humanitarian media machine to remind us that we are all humans in search of the most basic necessities: a roof over our heads, some food to eat, and people to love and share it with. We present Refuge with a newly commissioned score by Joshua Hartman, which brings a fresh perspective and continuity to the soundtrack of the original footage, much of which was poorly edited, accentuated by live narration. Part II of The Propaganda Machine Show will lead us in a very different direction into the Fascist propa-

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ganda of the 1940s with the chamber opera Greenland (Kassof / HutKono), in which I take a lead role. Part III presents a cabaret led and directed by Nicole Renna as a satirical conclusion, recalling the birth of a genre in the early 1920s as a positive consequence of war, where people from all walks of life could dress up to sing and lighten some heavy hearts with witty banter and cocktails. If we cannot remember to become human again, to laugh, to smile, to love, our existence will crumble into the surreal reality of fake news. We cannot surrender to that mindset. We must continue to see our similarities despite our differences —from Spain (Ceuta and Melilla), to Palestine, to Syria, to Mexico, to the former Yugoslavia, to Rwanda, to Afghanistan, to Ukraine, to right here in Philadelphia. We are one world, one humanity, and we are our only refuge from ourselves.

Works Cited Crusells, Magí. “Refuge, a Pro-Republican Documentary from the Spanish Civil War.” International Journal of Iberian Studies 19.3 (2007), pp. 231-239.

Photogram from Refuge.

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Jean-Paul Le Chanois, the director of Refuge.

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Portrayal of Displacement: A Spanish Civil War Film and The Propaganda Machine Spain’s Cultural Office, Washington D.C., October 23, 2019.

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Musical Itineraries of the 1939 Spanish Republican Exiles in the Americas

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“Itineraries.” From Exile to the Inner Voice Carlos José Martínez Fernández President Sociedad Torner

Poetry, a fortified weapon of the present —within a future that seems so far away— brings us closer like no other creation of the same root to this inner voice that shakes our vital foundations until it splits open into the first and final meaning of our work. Those that left in exile arrived not with a perishing wound, but with the ability to exercise unyielding freedom and the perfect excuse to walk the first steps through which our now perceived modernity has since ploughed. The critic, musicologist, and composer Adolfo Salazar found literature to be the way to encourage those in the Spanish Republic to leave behind the corset of tradition and always look forward to the new winds that brought the sounds of Neo-classicism and Impressionism from France, Russia, and the heart of old Europe. This undeniable path of transition towards their own liberation —although many would have to pay the price with exile— follows a meaningful language, doting on the singularity and ethics of a work riddled with truth and sense.

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Falla, Halffter, Pitaluga, Bacarisse, and Prieto are only some of the names that would reap efforts on two shores, arriving at a future with mastery, beauty, and formal simplicity. Having received the commission to set to music some of these poems, encouraged by the same idea of freedom in movement, I have turned esthetically and in form to the Impressionist and Neo-classicist references, to try to place value on each one of the verses by García Lorca, Salinas, Cernuda, Guillén, and Champourcin. For García Lorca, I have utilized a simple but modest language, open yet in no way restricted by form and also distanced from any labels. At the heart of it are references to Thelonius Monk, that place between classical music and jazz, though unable to fall under either category. If Champourcin writes well-aimed arrows straight into the heart of the reader, the music can only be an excuse to veil and softly trace a path through which flows every letter, every word, every verb, every ... In the music for the poetry of Salinas and Guillén, we find a different register, removed from any trace of goodness and claimed beauty, without renouncing a militant simplicity. Nocturno de los Avisos [Nocturne of the Advertisements] tries to tell of a small universe, a microtheatrical history brought to the edge of delirium on the stage, only with the help of the voice —alone and assertive— of the soprano who is always flanked by the piano. There is no intention —in fact just the opposite. A moment of music, not less not more, the inner voice, the modern and brave poet facing the desolation and nakedness of the composer. However, Contigo [With You] and Cernuda create a counterpoint in the recital. It is a text that is so overwhelmingly beautiful! There is no other recourse from there but to part, step aside, and let that inner voice resound. I can but only applaud the decision of the soprano to include the marvelous text of Alberti’s Se equivocó la paloma [The Dove Was Mistaken] in the extraordinary version by the Argentinian Guastavino. Its beauty justifies a whole life dedicated to composition. To be born to write this music is a total privilege and to share my stay with it, a gift. All in due time.

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PROGRAM MUSICAL ITINERARIES OF THE 1939 SPANISH REPUBLICAN EXILES IN THE AMERICAS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_32ncpnNELo&list=PLwlwEKr o8bRjdSepyCFHHfHsFIB-RUU0z&index=6 SOPRANO: Anaïs Naharro-Murphy PIANO: Moisés Ruiz de Gauna “Se equivocó la paloma” Carlos Guastavino (1912-2000) “Entre el clavel y la espada” 1941 Rafael Alberti (1902-1999) MUSIC: Carlos José Martínez Fernández Cuatro canciones con Lorca** Federico García Lorca (1898-1936) “De otro modo” Canciones para terminar 1921-24 “Deseo” Libro de poemas 1921 “Nana” (Compiled by Federico García Lorca) “Remanso-Cancion final” Primeras canciones 1922 “Nocturno de los Avisos”* Pedro Salinas (1891-1951) Todo más claro y otros poemas 1949 “Contigo”** Luis Cernuda (1902-1963) La realidad y el deseo 1927-1962 “Falling water”* Jorge Guillén (1893-1984) “Nuestra película no es de Hollywood”* Aire Nuestro 1968 “Si derribas el muro. . .”* Ernestina de Champourcin (1905-1999) Canción inútil 1936 *World premiere **USA premiere

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Anaïs Naharro-Murphy (Soprano) and Moisés Ruiz de Gauna (piano) Musical Itineraries of the 1939 Spanish Republican Exile in the Americas Music by Carlos José Martínez Fernández. Cultural Mexican Institute, Washington D.C. October 24, 2019.

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Eyewitnesses of Spain’s 1939 Exile in the Americas: The Privilege of Time and our Heartful Debt

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A “Carabinero” ’s Tale of Survival: 1936-1945 Pierre Verdaguer University of Maryland

Emilio Verdaguer, my father, was one of the first volunteers to enlist in a Catalan brigade shortly after the fascist insurrection, and when he volunteered, it was more with the intention of defending Catalonia than the country as a whole. Then, until the end of the war, he served with the Carabineros, a police force which became a fighting corps, and which was under the authority of the Republic. What follows, based on sixteen hours of recorded interviews, is the account of his personal experience from the end of the Spanish Civil War until the end of WWII, although I have also included a brief summary of his earlier military years. My father never talked much about those years of turmoil, although he occasionally made references to personal episodes, but always fleetingly and jokingly, as if those years had been a time of levity. For example, he would recall the day when he and two of his friends were kept at gunpoint for hours, and he would chuckle at the thought that his friends were so scared that they soiled their pants. Or he would marvel at the ingenuity of a general practitioner who had saved

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his leg from amputation. Those anecdotal references had become part of the family lore, but I had never shown any real interest in the whole narrative. After I had moved to the United States, though, I began feeling the need to explore that part of my father’s past, and I believe that living as an expatriate, far from the two countries where it all happened, had much to do with my desire to keep these memories alive, both as a personal and, more broadly, a historical legacy. Although born and raised in La Jonquera, a small village near the French border, Emilio was well on his way to receiving a university degree in electrical engineering when the war broke out. Young villagers with university experience were excessively rare in the 1930s, and from that perspective, Emilio was an oddity. As a youth, he had also spent some time in France with relatives, and he was conversant in French, which was not a negligible advantage once he became a refugee in Roussillon. He was also fortunate not to be among the retreating Spaniards who, after crossing the border into France in the winter of 1939, were herded into hastily created camps without the most basic amenities. Thus, his experience, both as a soldier and as a refugee, was in many ways quite atypical. When the war broke out Emilio was 19 years of age, and he had just completed his third year at the university of Barcelona, where he was enrolled in the engineering school. He needed two additional years to receive his degree. In June 1936 he was at home in La Jonquera, where he had returned at the end of the academic year, and where he was ready to enjoy his summer vacation. His parents owned a store that was run by his mother, and his father dabbled in real estate. His family was not poor, therefore, but like every other family in the village, it adhered to the prevalent lifestyle of penny pinching. Just a few days after the coup, while his father became steeped in village politics, he joined a group of young volunteers whose role was to patrol the village to compensate for the absence of law enforcement during the chaotic period that followed the insurrection, and roughly three months later, the Generalitat of Catalonia launched its call for volunteers to create Catalan brigades. Emilio went immediately to Barcelona, where he received some military training, and from there he was sent to the Aragon front, where constant skirmishes were typi-

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cal of that initial part of the war. Three months later, while on leave in La Jonquera, he heard that the corps of Carabineros was about to create combat-ready units, and he volunteered instead of returning to his brigade, believing that the Republic sorely needed a real army to fight the fascist forces. Once again, he was sent to the Aragon front, where nothing much was happening, and where he soon became terribly bored. So, when he heard that truck drivers were needed, he immediately volunteered, thinking that it would be a welcome change of pace. Very few men knew how to drive, but he had driven the family car since he was 14, and he also had mechanical skills, so he was immediately taken. Delivering ammunition was extremely dangerous, and there were many casualties among the drivers, but he could no longer complain about being bored, and he remembers enjoying his six months at the wheel of Ford trucks, which had been delivered to the corps via France. Towards the end of 1937, he met a colonel who was the Inspector General of the Combat Forces. As luck would have it, that colonel, who was also Catalan, had been a friend of his father years before, when he was stationed in La Jonquera, and he asked Emilio to be his personal chauffeur. They drove all over, usually far enough from the front lines, and after his dangerous assignments as a truck driver, Emilio could not have dreamed of a better life. However, after eight months of carefree living, he once again became bored, and he volunteered to be a fighter pilot. The colonel tried to dissuade him, but Emilio was determined, and he went to Barcelona to take the required medical examination. Unfortunately, he was rejected because of an inner ear problem. His dream of becoming a pilot was dashed, and he was devastated. The only thing to do was to go back to the Carabineros, but at that point, in the late fall of 1938, the military situation had worsened considerably, and the priority was to quickly create new units to stop the advancing Francoists, or at least slow them down. He was sent to Castelldefels, about ten miles to the south of Barcelona, where he joined soldiers who came from various parts of the front after their units had been dispersed and where they were regrouped into new brigades. The war was almost lost, and the Republicans were left with a stopgap strategy, which consisted in sending smaller units

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Emilio, as a young student in Barcelona (1934).

Emilio’s father in front of the family store destroyed by a fire in 1939.

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to allow their forces to quickly fall back. That strategy characterized the last months of the war, and Emilio’s unit was such a stopgap unit. Setting up positions in areas that had just been vacated by their troops was what they did, again and again, until the Francoists wiped them out. On his last mission, Emilio was wounded in the leg by grenade shrapnel. He was lucky, though, because four of his buddies were killed right next to him. In spite of his wound, he managed to hobble to the coast, thirty miles away, where he joined retreating Republican troops, and in February 1939 he ended up in a makeshift hospital in Camprodon, in the Pyrenees, not far from the French border. The place was not equipped for surgery, so taking care of his leg was not an option. However, luck was again on his side when an older Carabinero stationed there recognized him and managed to alert his father, who was able to pick him up and take him home to La Jonquera just in time to cross the border into France before the arrival of the retreating Republican army. Emilio, who had been a volunteer with the Catalan Brigades, was identified as a dangerous separatist, and his father, who had been involved with the village Revolutionary Committee, was branded as a troublemaker. So, the family could not stay in Catalonia for fear of reprisal. However, unlike most refugees, they had relatives and friends on the French side, where Catalan was still widely spoken at the time, which made communication easy, and where, therefore, they would feel very much at home not far from their own home. Furthermore, Emilio’s father had long foreseen the disastrous outcome of the war, and his first precautionary measure had been to transfer the family money to a French bank. Not being poor also helped. Emilio and his parents, his brother, his sister, and his grandmother first spent a few days with French relatives in Le Perthus just before the arrival of the retreating Republican army. Emilio, who was no longer in uniform, saw from a distance the bedraggled and defeated soldiers as they walked across the border. It was a distressing sight, and he felt very fortunate not to be among them. Once the Spanish refugees had been taken to the coastal camps, the family went to the small town of Amélie-les-Bains, just a few miles away, where they rented a small apartment from a friend. Compared to most refugees, they were clearly privileged. On the other

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hand, as soon as they had left La Jonquera, their house was ransacked, and all their possessions stolen. To make matters worse, flammable products, which had been stored there by retreating soldiers, caught fire, and the whole building went up in flames. Nothing was left. Life during the first couple of months in Amélie was uneventful and marked by inactivity. The family wondered what Franco would do. Would he declare a general amnesty for all Republican exiles, or perhaps a partial one likely to exclude those accused of banditry, as they were called? They simply had to wait. What had become truly worrisome, though, was the condition of Emilio’s leg. It had been almost two months since he had been wounded, and his leg, which he could no longer bend because his knee was the size of a soccer ball, was infected and needed to be treated urgently. As a foreigner without official documents, being admitted to a hospital was out of the question. So, he went to see a local doctor, Dr. Bouix, a general prac-

Memorial to Dr. Bouix, who saved Emilio’s leg. The inscription reads: “Victim of Nazi Barbarity.”

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titioner. Bouix, who was a caring man, did not care whether Emilio was legally in the country or not. At the time, he was also the mayor of Amélie, and he later became the head of a local resistance network. As a result, that good man ended up in a concentration camp, where he died towards the end of the war. Bouix realized that removing the shrapnel was urgent for fear gangrene would set in, and he decided to operate. He was not qualified to do that sort of work, but Emilio felt relieved that he was finally getting some medical attention. The date was March 17, 1939, almost exactly two months after he was wounded. Bouix declared that no anesthetic was needed, but he gave Emilio a pencil to bite on while he tried to remove the metal. He had taken x-rays, and he made several attempts with pincers, but they all failed. As a surgeon, he was defeated, but he then opted for a totally unconventional approach, saying that it was worth a try, otherwise the leg would have to be amputated. Amélie-les-Bains is known for its hot springs with curative properties, but there is also a spring up in the hills which has been proven to accelerate the healing of small wounds for reasons that have always remained unclear. Although not exactly a well-kept secret, its properties had never been advertised, but Bouix was well aware of its curative effects. So, his plan B was to resort to the virtues of that water. With gauze, he made wicks, then he reopened every single wound (there were 14 of them), and, with a slender metal tool, he inserted the wicks as deeply as they would go, and he bandaged the whole thing. “Now, what you have to do is pour some of that water on your leg twice a day. It needs to go all the way down into the wounds. And you’ll have to replace the bandage regularly,” he said. To Emilio’s amazement, after about a week of that treatment, all the wicks started coming out, pushed out from below as the wounds were closing nicely from the bottom up. Bouix’s unorthodox treatment was working. It took about five weeks for all the wicks to be totally pushed out of the wounds, and not long after that, Emilio was able to walk normally again. His leg had been saved. The shrapnel had to stay where it was, but Bouix knew from WWI experience that soldiers could live with pieces of metal in their bodies without ill effects.

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La Jonquera in the 1950s, unchanged since the 1930s.

Amélie-les-Bains in the 1930s.

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In the fall of 1939 there was much talk of an impending war, and when Hitler invaded Poland, and France and Britain declared war on Germany, it seemed that sooner or later the conflict would start on the Franco-German border. That was not good for Emilio and all the other former Republican soldiers, as more and more French citizens were grumbling about having to house and feed the refugees, courtesy of French taxpayers. It had been suggested that those Republican soldiers, who were not earning their keep, should be sent to the front to defend the country that had so generously opened its borders to them. After three years of fighting in Spain and nearly losing his leg, that idea did not appeal to Emilio in the least. He was wondering what to do when the family received the unexpected visit of the right-hand man of Fontanals, a friend and occasional business partner of his father’s, who resided in Barcelona. Fontanals, who was well connected, believed he could pull strings to have Emilio pardoned, but first, Emilio had to return to Spain illegally. Going back to Spain was clearly extremely risky, but Emilio agreed to go, and he managed to sneak back into the country with the help of smugglers, who had accomplices among the customs officers at the border crossing between Bourg-Madame and Puigcerdà, higher up in the Pyrenees. Emilio arrived in Barcelona without problems, and he stayed there with the family friends. After close to two months, though, Fontanals confessed that he had not been able to do anything about Emilio’s reintegration into the country. The next step was far from obvious, but an opportunity presented itself. It had been about nine months since the Republican defeat, and at that point, France was encouraging Republican refugees to return to Spain. Many, who hoped that there would not be harsh retaliatory measures against them, particularly those who had not volunteered but simply been drafted in 1938, opted for returning to their country. To prepare for their return, they had first to contact the mayor’s office in their town or village and request to have three influential Francoist sponsors vouch for them. The people who went back to Spain were a mixed lot: soldiers, of course, but also civilians and whole families. They returned from the

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French camps by train and arrived at the station in Figueres. They were then escorted by soldiers to a courtyard where they were called one by one by an officer and told to report to the local authorities of their village or town within 24 hours. Emilio had learned all that, and he decided to masquerade as a refugee. He went to Figueres wearing old, dirty clothes and carrying a battered suitcase, waited in hiding for the arrival of the refugees, and surreptitiously joined the group on its way to the courtyard, which he managed to do without attracting the guards’ attention. Some refugees looked a bit surprised, but they clearly did not care if a newcomer wished to be with them. The officer in charge of the roll call could not find Emilio’s name on his list, naturally, but he thought it was a clerical error, and he sent him to the Guardia Civil in La Jonquera. His uncle, who had never left the village, had been alerted ahead of time by Fontanals, and he had found the required sponsors. In the village, Emilio had to report to the Guardia Civil every day, where he had to say ¡Viva Franco! in a loud voice, a most humiliating thing for a Republican. He did that for a couple of weeks until he received his official summons, and then went to Girona to appear in front of a military tribunal. The verdict was three years in a disciplinary battalion. It turned out that there was nothing unusual about that sentence. All the Republican soldiers who were branded as resolute opponents to the fascist regime received a similar one, and he was sent to a prison camp to the south of Lleida. As Emilio put it, being there was no fun. The prisoners slept in small tents without tarp flooring, although they had been given enough blankets, which was good because it was the middle of winter. There was also sufficient food. It was not very good, but at least they did not starve. They were always closely watched by armed soldiers, who did not miss a single opportunity to be abusive or even rough them up. Reveille was at 5:00, and once they heard the bugle call, they had to gather for inspection. The next step, when standing at attention, was to shout “¡Viva Franco!” and then sing the Cara al Sol, the anthem of the Falange. It ended with the traditional “¡Arriba España!” They were then entitled to the usual quick breakfast of coffee and bread, and then, the day of hard labor began. The prisoners had to

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build a temporary bridge to allow for the foot crossing of a wide river. The original stone bridge had been destroyed like so many others. So, every day, from sunrise to sunset, Emilio stood barefoot in very cold water, digging holes for the posts meant to support the horizontal beams. Incidentally, that camp was not just a hard labor camp. The idea was to break the prisoners not only physically but also mentally and to make them see how deluded they had been to fight on the Republican side. Totally by chance, two or three days after his arrival, Emilio came across a fellow student from his university days in Barcelona. His name was March. He had been a captain in the Republican army, and he was a hardcore Marxist and a rather fanatic activist. Knowing that he could probably be linked to what the Francoists labeled “criminal” acts, Emilio was surprised that he was in the camp with the rest of common foot soldiers, but March had falsified his record to pose as a regular infantryman. If the guards had found out, he would have ended up in front of a firing squad. After a few weeks of this arduous treatment, Emilio started having second thoughts about his decision to accept his punishment. It was the period known as the Phony War, which fooled people into thinking that there would not be a real European conflict. Emilio was deluded like everyone else, and he decided to escape and return to France. He knew he might be drafted, but his plan was to try and go to Mexico or Argentina once there. March, who constantly feared that his actual rank and past activities would be discovered, was eager to escape as well. They both agreed on a plan, and they had been waiting for opportune weather when one morning, after the prisoners had assembled as usual, the order came to form ranks, and they were all taken to the nearby train station, where a freight train was waiting for them. They were ordered to climb into the cattle cars, and the train departed. They had no idea where they were going, of course, but Emilio, who was quite familiar with the area, soon realized that they were headed towards Barcelona. “At least, it’s the right direction,” he thought. As expected, in due time, the train arrived in Barcelona, and it kept going north to Girona, and then on towards Figueres, in other words

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towards the border. Emilio became more and more elated. Fortunately, he and March were in the same car, and Emilio whispered that they needed to jump. He knew exactly where that could be done. A few miles south of Figueres, the railroad bridge over the river named El Fluvià had been destroyed during the war, and a temporary bridge had been hastily built as a replacement. Emilio knew that, and he also knew that the train would have to slow down significantly to go over the makeshift structure, which is exactly what happened. There were guards sitting at the far end of the car, half asleep. The sliding doors had been kept open, and Emilio and March sat down at the opening with their legs dangling outside, which the prisoners were allowed to do. As soon as the train had crossed the river and its speed was at its lowest, they jumped. They quickly hid under the bridge with much trepidation, expecting the train to stop at any moment and soldiers to come out looking for them, but the train did not stop, and it kept gathering speed. To their great relief, it soon disappeared around a bend. Naturally, their Republican companions had kept mum. Emilio and March found a little grove where they waited for nightfall, and they started on their trek under the cover of darkness. March, who was from Girona, was not familiar with the border area, and Emilio told him that they needed to go through the mountains to the east of La Jonquera towards the Puig Neulós, the peak right on the border. From there, they would go down towards SaintGénis-des-Fontaines, on the French side. He knew that part of the mountain like the back of his hand, but the trick was to avoid border patrols. They walked all night, cutting across fields and woods. It was late April 1940, and the weather was mild. By dawn, they reached the village of Capmany, about five miles south of La Jonquera, but they stayed clear of it. They found a secluded clump of trees where they hid and rested. On the second day, as soon as night had fallen, they left their hiding place and started to hike towards the mountains, which were not very far, looking out for frontier guards. The problem was that, as they kept climbing, the fog be-

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came thicker and thicker, which was not an uncommon occurrence in the spring. So, even though Emilio had been there several times before, he became disoriented. On top of the mountain, he could not tell anymore which side was Spanish and which was French. March was no help. They finally took a leap of faith, going down with some apprehension, and all of a sudden, the fog lifted, and they saw Saint-Génis-des-Fontaines in the valley, just below. They were saved. They ran all the way to the village, where they went straight to the local Gendarmerie to report as freshly arrived refugees. The Gendarmes, who spoke Catalan, were all very nice. They kindly called Mias, the friend of Emilio’s parents in Amélie, who had a butcher shop and could be reached by telephone, and Mias came to pick them up in his little van two hours later. By then, France had issued a decree whereby all male refugees had to serve in the French military in one capacity or another, but not necessarily as combatants. Emilio and March, who had become legitimate refugees, were issued contracts by the army, and they started working as auxiliaries in Perpignan at the end of April 1940, just a few days before the start of the Battle of France in early May. Emilio was hired as a truck driver, and March as his assistant. They received a small salary, and they found a small and inexpensive hotel with a meal plan. After the hardships of the labor camp, it was Heaven on Earth. Their work consisted in carrying truckloads of various building materials to a site in Rivesaltes, a few miles to the north of Perpignan, where an army base being refurbished for the training and troop reassignments from French Colonial Africa, (the Camp Joffre), later a concentration camp for Spanish refugees, Jews, Harkis, Gypsies, or irregular immigrants, would be used until 2006 [today, Mémorial du camp de Rivesaltes]. France was bringing manpower from its various colonies to help with the war effort. Everything was going as well as could be expected, but after a month or so, it all came abruptly to an end. The truck had just been loaded at a brickyard, and they were ready to leave, when a Gendarmerie van barreled into the yard at full speed and screeched to a halt right in front of them. Gendarmes jumped out, opened the truck doors, yanked Emilio and March out of the cab, and pushed

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them forcibly into the van without a single word of explanation. They were taken to one of the Gendarmeries in Perpignan, and once there, Gendarmes, who were clearly third-degree experts, started on a long session of punches, kicks, and other assorted blows while they asked questions like “Who are your superiors? How do you get your orders? What are you asked to do exactly? How do you forward the information?” Etc. Between blows, Emilio attempted to ask what they were being accused of, but he only got insults and more blows in return. That night they slept in a cell, and the following morning, they were treated to another third-degree session: more blows, more insults, more ridiculous questions. Emilio kept begging the gendarmes to get in touch with his parents in Amélie, but it was clear that they had no intention of contacting anyone. Later that day, the two men were taken to the prison of the Argelès camp. It was a prison for undesirables, as the inmates were called. The prison buildings were surrounded by three separate fences of barbed wire, and armed Gendarmes constantly patrolled the perimeter. Escaping was clearly out of the question, and Emilio and March were kept there with absolutely no way of contacting anyone on the outside. Once there, intense and relentless interrogations continued, almost on a daily basis, but Emilio and March were not actually beaten up. Although when France started losing the war, their guards took out their frustration and anger on the prisoners, hitting them viciously with the butts of their submachine guns. No one was spared. The prisoners (there were about 250 to 300 of them) were a mixed lot and a blend of European nationalities who were all believed to pose a threat to national defense. At least there was enough to eat. Spanish Republicans from the nearby refugee camp brought in the food in huge vats, and they ladled it out under the supervision of guards, being under strict orders not to communicate with the detainees. In spite of the danger inherent in any attempt to connect with those men, Emilio decided to try it. He managed to get hold of a pencil and a small piece of paper and wrote: “I am at the Argelès camp prison.” He added his parents’ address, and “please forward” in both French and Spanish. Then he folded

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the message into a tiny square with the intention of slipping it into a Spaniard’s hand at lunchtime. His first attempt failed: the man was obviously scared, and he dropped the message. Fortunately, Emilio’s attempt went unnoticed, but the following day, he was successful. The Spaniard held on to the message, and Emilio could only hope that the he would mail it. A few days later, guards took him to the administrative building where the commanding officer, a major, had his office. The major looked him up and down, did not ask questions, and sent him back to the prison. That was enough to suggest that something was afoot. Emilio was taken there again on two different days, and the last time, there was also an older gentleman in civilian clothes in the room. The major glanced at Emilio and turned to the gentleman saying: “Take this young man out of here. I’ve never seen him, and no one needs to know that he was ever here. He’s yours, and he’s your problem.” And that’s how Emilio was discharged from the place. March, on the other hand, was not part of the deal, and he was not freed. Mias, the family friend, had been waiting outside in his van, and he drove Emilio back to the village, where he finally learned why he and March had been arrested and how his release had been arranged. It turned out that the Spanish refugee who had taken his message had mailed it immediately. At that time, the conditions at the camp for refugees had improved noticeably since 1939. People lived in wooden shelters, and there were little vending stalls nearby where various necessities could be purchased, including writing supplies and stamps. Sending and receiving correspondence was allowed, and his savior was able to forward his message. However, he was careful not to include his name and return address, and Emilio never knew who that Good Samaritan was. When his parents received the message, they asked their French friends if they had any idea how to get Emilio out of his prison. One of them, Grill, who had some connections, found out that the name of the officer in charge of the prison was Lavagne. It so happened that a retired officer in Amélie went by the same name, and they all went to see him. As luck would have it again, it turned out that the retiree was

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the major’s older brother. That kind man intervened, and after much hesitation and repeated pleas, his brother agreed to release Emilio. The man’s reluctance was understandable, though, since the retired officer explained that Emilio and March had been reported as German spies. How could the gendarmes have believed that two fervent Catalan Republicans, separatists to boot, could possibly be German spies? The problem was that there were legitimate German spies in the country, including in the area of Perpignan, where African troops were expected to arrive, and at the time, the national ailment called espionite (“spyosis”) meant that good citizens saw spies everywhere and reported their presence to the police. So why were Emilio and his friend denounced as spies? That remained a mystery. What Emilio surmised, rightly or wrongly, was that someone at the brickyard had heard them say “ya, ya, ya,” the common expression used in Spanish Catalonia, although not in Roussillon, as a substitute for “sí, sí, sí.” Could that have been it? Emilio never found out. In any case, things were looking up again, except that France had just lost the war, and German troops came to border areas well before the so-called Free Zone was occupied at the end of 1942. Emilio was lucky to have left the prison just before the arrival of German forces, because they took over the place, and he heard that the first thing they did was to put all the Spanish prisoners in a freight car and send them to Franco’s Spain. March was among them, but Emilio heard years later that he miraculously had not been executed and that he had managed to return to France, where he now lived. German soldiers were constantly seen on patrol in the border area near Amélie, which is just a few miles from Spain, as the crow flies. Officially, they were customs officers, but everyone knew that they were bona fide military personnel. Emilio ended up knowing some of them by sight, because he worked for a few months as a woodcutter in that general area to generate some income for the family. The new problem, though, was that in 1941, the Vichy Government started sending Spanish refugees to Germany to work in factories or to the Nazi war constructions in France. Since Emilio definitely did not want to go to Germany, he looked into ways of leaving the country. He heard that there was a special agreement between Vichy France

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Recent photo of the building where Emilio had his room at Batère.

Lucile and Emilio in 1945.

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and Mexico that dated back to August 22, 1940, which stipulated that Spanish refugees could be allowed to emigrate to Mexico. He immediately applied for the required immigration documents, which were jointly issued by Vichy and the Mexican legation in Marseille in April 1941. With those documents in hand, he went to Marseille, where a ship was scheduled to leave for Mexico. At the port, he bought his ticket, and he was told that everything was in order and that the ship would leave within a few days. However, the departure kept being delayed, and after about two weeks, it was announced that the German authorities were not allowing the ship to leave. Their decision was final. This is how Emilio’s Mexican adventure came to an end. He had no other choice but to go back to Amélie, where he resumed his woodcutting activities. The danger of ending up in a German factory was still quite real, and Spaniards were periodically rounded up and sent there, but that did not seem to be a constant problem. On the other hand, Emilio injured himself while wielding his axe, and that put an end to his career as a woodcutter. He had to stay in bed for days to recover, but as soon as he was able to walk again he started looking for another job, and he was lucky to find one at the local hydroelectric power plant. That was more in keeping with his training as an electrical engineer, and he worked there until September 1943. He enjoyed his work at the plant, purchased technical books to hone his skills, and in 1942, he met Lucile, the young woman who was to become his wife. So, everything was going smoothly, and life was good. Unfortunately, in the fall of 1943, the Germans, who now occupied the whole country and were more than ever desperate for manpower, began to round up Spanish refugees as Vichy had done two years earlier. Once again, being sent to Germany or to a Nazi military base in France was a serious concern. Until then, Emilio had managed to keep a low profile, but now he quickly needed to find a way to avoid ending up in a German factory. It so happened that the old Batère iron mine, which had been closed since 1931, had just been reopened. The mine is located at an elevation of about 5,000 feet on the southern side of the Canigou, roughly halfway to the top, a 12-mile hike from Amélie. The Germans had just ordered it to be reopened

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Immigration document issued by the Mexican Legation in Marseille.

Photo sent by Emilio to his parents from Marseille with the note: “A hug from your son.”

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because of the special properties of its iron ore. It was therefore under their control, but there were no Germans there, and a French director had been appointed to run the mining operation. The good thing, Emilio realized, was that working at the mine would be like hiding in plain sight, and he went to see the director to apply for a job. It so happened that the man had been desperately looking for an electromechanical technician, and Emilio was hired on the spot. Once at the mine, he realized that many miners were Spanish refugees who, like him, had also decided to hide in plain sight. Emilio could not complain about his life at Batère, where his work was interesting and where he was safe from the Germans, although he did not have enough to eat, and it was terribly cold in the winter. Except in the worst weather, though, going from the mine to Amélie was not a problem. After work on Saturdays, he hiked down to the valley, spent Sundays with Lucile, and hiked back up to the mine on Sunday nights so as to be at work the following morning by 8 o’clock. He walked all night. As an electrician, he had managed to procure an Ausweis (pass), which allowed him to be on the roads after the curfew. Having such a document made life much easier. He did not sleep at all those nights, but seeing Lucile was worth it. Ironically, the area around Batère was a well-known hotbed of local resistance, and the résistants came to the mine on a regular basis. Most of them were former soldiers of the Spanish Republic, and they were more than welcome there. Emilio and many of his fellow workers were not technically part of the resistance network, but they did what they could to help, carrying packages for the fighters to and from the valley. The problem was that the Germans eventually became aware that résistants felt totally at home at a place which was supposedly under their supervision. In August 1944, they mounted a large-scale military operation to make a clean sweep of the network, and 1,000 to 1,200 well-equipped troops came up from the valley. It did not take them long to defeat the 100 or so resistance fighters. On the day of the attack, as Emilio watched the German troops wending their way up the mountain, he knew that he and his fellow workers were trapped. They were going to be surrounded, and fleeing was out of the question. So, he decided to simply wait in the

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building, where he was joined by two of his pals. His room, like all the others, opened onto a balcony that ran the whole length of the building. Emilio’s was basically in the middle. Except for the three of them, the building was empty. Soon, they heard footsteps at the end of the balcony. German soldiers were coming. They stopped at every room, bashed in the door, and threw in a grenade. The explosions were getting closer and closer, and Emilio thought it was high time to wave his little white handkerchief tied to the end of a stick through the door opening, hoping that his symbol of surrender would work. It took two tries before the Germans stopped shooting, but the three men were finally taken to the basement where they had to stand at gunpoint against a wall with their hands up for several hours. That was when Emilio’s friends, who were understandably scared out of their wits, soiled their pants. The battle with the résistants was still going on, but it was soon over. The three men were then led to an area where prisoners had been gathered and where the Germans were dividing them. One group was composed of mineworkers only, while another was a mix of both mineworkers and résistants. Being sent to the latter would not be good, Emilio thought. In fact, he later heard that those men had all been executed. One of the officers in charge of the sorting process looked familiar. Emilio knew that he had seen him before, but where? It finally clicked. He was the German officer he had seen many times on a riverbank, down in the valley, where he went to swim in the summer. They had never exchanged a word, naturally, but like Emilio, he was a regular there, and that was the extent of what they had in common. The officer clearly recognized Emilio as well, because he immediately signaled to a soldier to take him to a truck bound for the valley. Once again, luck had been on Emilio’s side. Obviously, the officer could not be certain that he was not a résistant, but being part of the same community of swimmers had clearly made a difference. Perhaps Emilio would not have been killed even if that officer had not been at Batère that day, but some mineworkers, who were not résistants, were also executed. So, who knows? At that point, the liberation of France was already underway, and from one day to the next, the Germans left. All of a sudden, the Nazi occupation in Roussillon came to an end, and in Amélie, life returned

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to normal before the end of August 1944. However, Emilio and Lucile waited until the country was finally totally liberated to exchange vows, and they got married on April 7, 1945. Emilio found a job in

The wedding in April 1945.

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Perpignan, and so did Lucile, who had a few years of experience working for the postal service. Emilio then became a French citizen, but in the mid-1980s, the Spanish government passed a law rehabilitating the members of the Corps of Carabineros. As a veteran, Emilio was even entitled to a tiny pension. That felt very good, and in 1990, he reclaimed his Spanish citizenship. Spain could be his home again.

Emilio as a rehabilitated “Carabinero” and a new member of the Veterans’ Association.

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Francesc Torres Stephen Mansbach University of Maryland

Francesc Torres is an artist of many parts, as much poet, memorialist, and historian as he is a distinguished maker of photographs, sculpture, and, especially, highly compelling installations. What unites his remarkable, diverse achievements since at least the 1970s is his commitment to a visual aesthetics of political discourse and social action. In an emotionally potent photographic series capturing, for instance, sites of the Spanish Civil War, or Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan, among many other historically haunted locations, Torres goes far beyond visual documentation. He presents stark images that compel a revaluation of received reality. In truth, in his photographic images, and perhaps even more through his extraordinary installations, he challenges us to reconsider our memories of events and the ideologies that support them. In essence, Torres presents a poetics of art through which to construct from the remains of history —whether from the era of Franco or post-war Berlin, or contemporary New York— a new collective conscience. He asks, as we shall see in today’s presentation, how and in what ways might ART do justice to history, and thereby promote a new political consciousness.

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Ah! Distance… Francesc Torres Transation from Spanish: José María Naharro-Calderón

In Paris, in May 1968 (yes, I am a certifiable soixantehuitard [sixtyeigher]), when I was 19 years old, I discovered that when the protesters were charging seriously, the police would back off, and that if a cobblestone hit a CRS (Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité) the poor man had to be carried away on a stretcher, both things never seen in Franco’s Spain of my adolescence. Since I was a brat, I didn’t realize, on the other hand, another detail that was equally significant and evident to anyone who had the ability, nothing exceptional, to detect it: Gaullism did not fire a single shot. There were only two deaths and none of them was a direct consequence of the police action. There were broken bones, fractured skulls and a few missing eyes, but no shots. It didn’t matter, for me, the famous storm the skies was in the bag. The truth is that the time I spent in Spain between the two years in Paris and my departure to the United States (of my own free will, no one was persecuting me) were spent convinced that the revolution was not only imminent, but that avant-garde experimental art was idoneous for the task, as in revolutionary Russia, and not the explicitly representational, figurative, direct art, which was expected at that time from a manifestly committed artist. That seemed bourgeois and

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retrograde to me, a Stalinist mistake. I also believed, in this case with some foundation, that the Franco regime was not only destroying our lives and the future by making us live in the most perverse and depressing mediocrity, but on top of that was forcing us to fight it with an absolutely cutesy art. While I was brooding on the results, for the three years I was in Spain, I made an art that was more Anglo-Saxon than Southern-European, more idealistic than ideological, although it seemed just the opposite to me. It was totally impossible for me to make orthodoxically “political” art in Franco’s Spain, and neither did I want to imitate some abstract painters whose commitment just came up to a title, Motherwell style: Homage to the Spanish Republic, for example. It seemed to me, in my unshaved arrogance, ridiculous. I came to the United States with the baggage I have just described. Fortunately art is benevolent and saves you from yourself if you let it, if you know how to recognize its integrity and internal coherence and if you listen to what it is asking you to do. If you know how to do it, you will be rewarded with some works of merit, although you do not fully realize this until much later. Within the second year of my arrival, I had already moved towards an incipient narrative art solidly supported by non-artistic contents; I was interested in history, politics, anthropology, neurology, evolutionary biology in order to develop a visual discourse through an aesthetic, artistic and symbolic language. More nor less what Levi-Strauss had already explained without talking about art a decade earlier, the kind of things that at that time were not taught in art schools. Meanwhile, another determining circumstance had taken place; the geographical distance between Europe and the United States had fostered its metaphoricalemotional equivalence and it allowed me to look back at my original context with the necessary metaphorical distance to make the feeling of imposition disappear. From then on, it was possible for me to relate to the historical breeding ground that had made me who I was, without rejection, in order to analyze and understand it. Without leaving Spain that would have been totally impossible for me. The result of this process was embodied in a hybrid format, in a work that used the narrative strategy through the multimedia installation —the type of work that most represents me— with clear North

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American roots, with fundamentally European contents that in some specific cases dealt with the recent history of Spain and / or World War II, a binomial that I have always considered indissoluble when perceiving the Spanish Civil War as a dress rehearsal of the World War that followed and, also —although this was a later realization— because I was a chemically pure consequence of a whole series of historical events, in particular the war in Spain, which I had not had the opportunity to live directly and experientially (I was born nine years after it ended). Everything had happened before I was born, something that I came to perceive as an extreme cruel injustice that generated an unavoidable emotional need to make everything my own in the most literal way possible, eliminating the time that separated facts from consequences —as if that were possible— the thirties of the 20th century from the present pandemic of the 21st century, so to speak. The time that I got closer to that ideal was with the project Dark Is the Room Where We Sleep [Oscura es la habitación donde dormimos] from 2004-2007. The origins of this project are found in another project carried out twenty years earlier entitled Belchite / South Bronx: A Trans-Cultural, Tran-Historical Landscape, abreast the old town of Belchite, destroyed during the Spanish Civil War, and New York’s South Bronx destroyed in a supposedly peaceful time. The state of abandonment of the old Belchite was depressing, despite the fact that it had been declared by the Franco regime itself as a war memorial. It had been dropped (now there is almost nothing left) without having been investigated archaeologically, free of explosives, structurally consolidated, minimally cleaned (it was full of garbage and dead animals) and organized to receive visitors. It still had a tremendous aural strength in the small details you discovered everywhere; the bullet holes in the deformed bars of the balconies, the pear-shaped porcelain switches, or the Aragonese indigo blue in the house interiors, for example, or the balcony over the door to the town entrance arch where there had been a machine gun sweeping Main Street, manned by an African-American volunteer from the Lincoln Brigade. But all this paled before the absolute political neglect in terms of the recovery and dignity of the bodies of Republican soldiers and civilians scattered throughout the peninsular geography. The famous

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historical amnesia sustained by the no less famous and convenient dictum that “we were all guilty.” “Dark is the Room . . .” entered fully into the uncertain territory of capital historical, memorialist and moral importance through the photographic documentation of the archaeological and anthropological excavation of a mass grave from mid-September 1936, and the exhumation of forty-six bodies of civilians, all males, ranging in age from seventeen to seventy four, in Villamayor de los Montes, Burgos, because it was not possible for me to do so in Catalonia thanks to Esquerra Republicana de . . . Cataluña.1 I financed this campaign myself with a Fulbright and direct financial aid from two American foundations, the Bohen Foundation in New York and the American Center in Paris, that is, a Spanish mass grave could be exhumed with USA money, all set in motion by an artist of Hispanic-Catalan origin, nationalized from the United States, details of which can be speculated profusely. I have never been physically and emotionally closer to what I am a consequence of, than at the foot of the grave in Villamayor de los Montes. By then I had already decided that I was not going to get up in the morning knowing without any single doubt that I was going to make art; no; I was going to look for subjects on which it was imperative to act, and if what ended up emerging was art, fine, and if not, so be it. The important, crucial, urgent thing was to do it. This gave me enormous freedom of focus and action. At the end of the exhumation, the remains that were found and their belongings went to the School of Forensic Medicine in Madrid, where they were analyzed and the victims were identified. Of the forty-six bodies, forty-four were identified. The two that could not be were as a result of not being able to find living relatives for the DNA samples. I was left with the photos without knowing exactly what to do with them. I thought that the crucial thing was to display them, so the public would be aware of the magnitude of the problem, of never being sure what you were stepping on or upon whom you were enjoying a picnic in the country. At that time, 2004, there was not a single newspaper

1

A Catalonian pro-independence party founded in 1931 before the War in Spain.

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in Spain with the guts to publish this type of content —including El País, therefore, I was “condemned” to having to look for other avenues that were going to be within the world of art and photography. On the one hand, I was interested in seeing what would happen to

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these images as part of a museum setting through an artistic exhibition; on the other, I was not at all sure that with this type of images art could be made, in a way that justice would be done to the content by explaining it in a way that could only be possible through a work of art, with its intrinsic languages and its own untransferable narrative strategies. I was brooding over these when the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York threw me a cable. For them there was no problem because they were an institution dedicated to photography, fundamentally of war (Capa, “Chim” Seymour, Eugene Smith, Taro) with a strong connection with the war in Spain and its consequences, and my work was technically “deferred” war photography. In addition, they were preparing an anthological exhibit on Robert Capa where for the first time it was going to be accepted that the famous photo of the militiaman who had been shot in Cerro Murriano had been choreographed by the photographer. Alongside, the key Gerda Taro retrospective exhibition that made it crystal clear that Taro was a very great war photographer in her own right, free from her lover’s shadow. For those responsible at the ICP, I had closed the circle by photographing what they had not been able to do, eighty years later. All three exhibitions opened at the same time. The piece remains in their permanent collection and it has been exhibited little because I still find it uncomfortable to exhibit it in contemporary art museums next to things that are foreign to it. Curiously, and for the same reasons, military museums do not seem suitable either. The history museums in principle yes, but history museums are not interested in the kind of history that interests me. It is evident that leaving Spain and settling in the United States made it possible to carry out a very peculiar type of work that would not have been possible otherwise. In Spain, I very likely would not have done it or, if I had tried it, it would have had different nuances and, quite possibly, the most subtle ones would not have manifested themselves as they would have been too close to the sources. Paradoxically, in order to get closer to the subject of my obsessions, first I had to get as far as physically possible from my country of origin. First, eliminate the “Francoist” imposition in order to treat my personal

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and non-transferable history out of free will and conscious freedom. In fifty years I have made only five pieces that have to do directly with the recent history of Spain and the Civil War that ravaged the country in the 1930s. It is not much, rather the opposite. These are the fifty years that I have been living outside of Spain. These “Spanish” pieces are the guarantee of my seeds of origin. After all, with Max Aub in mind, I finished high school in Spain.

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Memorable People and Works from the New York Republican Exile in Oblivion Víctor Fuentes University of California-Santa Barbara Translation from Spanish: Nélida Devesa Gómez and José María Naharro-Calderón

Some are being recovered in recent years. They are people that I dealt with or knew about during my years in New York. I arrived, without knowing anyone, in the Fall of 1956, at the age of 23, a fugitive from Franco’s Spain left behind in June 1954. A few days later, I found myself in a Spanish pensión on 14th street, between 7th and 8th avenue. Had I arrived in Manhattan or was I in Avilés or Soria? It still existed, and more than traces, of what had been the Spanish New York neighborhood; some shops, such as Casa Moneo, and the Oviedo and La Bilbaína restaurants, plus the Guadalupe church. In the same block as the pensión was, and still is, the building of La Nacional, Centro Español ‘Spanish Center’. As I passed by, through the basement windows, I saw a small group of those immigrant veterans,

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sitting around a small table, some in their berets, drinking Anís del Mono and playing Tute or Mus; representatives of the once colony of Spanish immigrants in the USA, so little recognized today: “The Invisible Immigrants” to use the title of the recent, and so timely, book by James D. Fernández and Luis Argeo, where, with their photos, documents and memories, so many of “Los españoles en Estados Unidos [‘The Spanish in the United States’] (1868-1945)”, to use the subtitle of the book, are made to be seen and heard. Thousands of them, during the war, together with some exiles, as they arrived, joined the Sociedades Hispanas Confederadas [Confederate Hispanic Societies] of aid to Republican Spain, with their political and cultural protagonism maintained in the years of the Civil War and in postwar.1 I met quite a few, and more of their children, born there. Andrés Franco and Manuel de la Nuez, who studied with me at NYU and became notable university professors of Spanish, told me that as children they bathed in the river under the Brooklyn Bridge, sung by García Lorca in Poeta en Nueva York. In one of those twists and turns of the wheel of fortune, in a very short time I went from being one of the last nondescriptive immigrant newcomers, working low needy tasks, to coming into contact with a group of professors and their artist friends and from other professions, exiled in New York and in various cities in the East.2 As a young man of the latest generation, that of the children of war, they welcomed me with hospitality. I studied at NYU, and had some classes at Columbia University with several of them: Ángel del Río, Joaquín Casalduero, and Ernesto Guerra Da Cal. Then, pursuing a doctorate, I was an Instructor at Barnard College, between 1961 and 1965, teaching with Amelia Agostini de Río, Laura García Lorca de los Ríos, Margarita Ucelay, and sharing an office with the celebrated Spanish-Cuban poet and professor, Eugenio Florit. In such a social circle, I met and treat1

2

On this subject, likewise, James Fernández has given us a revealing essay, “New York: The Spanish Speaking Community Responds,” in the magnificent book, illustrated with multiple images and photos, jointly edited with Peter N. Carroll, Facing Fascism New York and The Spanish Civil War. I have already recounted my life experience and years as an intellectual apprentice in New York, between 1956 and 1965, in Bio-grafía americana [American Bio-Graphy].

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ed, although separated by generational distance, that egregious group of academics, artists and distinguished professionals from the Spanish exile, such as, in addition to those mentioned: Emilio González López, Francisco García Lorca, Homero Serís, Vicente Llorens, Eugenio Granell and his wife Amparo, Gustavo Durán . . . Some of the nights, when leaving a meeting at the home of Mr. Francisco García Lorca and Laura de los Ríos, at 448 Riverside Drive, the room presided over by the painting of Mr. Fernando de los Ríos, and with the venerable presence of his widow, Mrs. Gloria Giner de los Ríos, I felt the warmth of having been in a meeting in Republican Spain, and not facing the freezing New York night. Despite teaching in the best universities in the country and enjoying a comfortable life, the weight of the tragedy of the war and the lost Republic was still very present in their lives; talking about Spain and the situation under Franco was a continuous topic of conversation, in those years when the regime put on makeup, rejoined the Western bloc and began its overdevelopment. Changing bases, I move on to the subject of this essay, beginning with the evocation of one of the many anonymous exiles.

An Old Spanish Anarchist Judith Malina, director and actress of the legendary “Living Theater”, evokes him in her Diarios, about one of her visits to the New York Sociedad Internacional Anarquista [International Anarchist Society], which was frequented by several of the well-known beatnik authors. In the entry of November 19, 1951, she writes: “An old Spanish Anarchist, who always sits reading Bakunin, in rudimentary English, and with teary eyes, tells us about the heroic deaths of the Spanish Anarchist martyrs”(132). (Let’s recall that, since the last decades of the 19th century, there was an active union and press presence of Spanish Anarchists in the United States.)3 I highlight this resounding exam-

3

Three outstanding examples of these anarchist newspapers of New York, of long duration, were: El despertar [The Awakening] (1891-1912), Cultura proletaria

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ple: The New York Times, February 24, 1919, announced with large headlines that seventeen Spanish Anarchist-terrorists had been arrested on charges of planning the assassination of President Wilson with a bomb that was to be thrown at him during his visit to Boston. As it was later revealed, in inside pages and in small print, this was an illusion in order to dismantle the group, suspend their newspaper, and deport the members of the group “El Corsario” [“The Corsair”], very popular in the Hispanic labor media in New York, and formed by young people between twenty and twenty-four years old, cigarette workers or mechanics.

The Bohemian Alfonso Vidal y Planas, Forgotten “Poet in New York” Moving the internal exile to the outside —so typical of bohemian writers, one of the most notable among them from the second and third decade of the century arrived in New York in 1939: poet and playwright Alfonso Vidal y Planas.4 His play Santa Isabel de Ceres (the drama of a prostitute in Madrid’s Ceres street), had been a great success with the public and at the box office. His gains were soon washed down the drain by this bohemian author. In New York, he lived on and off from his writing trade, and left us his shocking version of “The poet —bohemian and exile— in New York”: Cirios en los rascacielos [Altar Candles on Skyscrapers]. He expresses several regrets about his cosmopolitan life: “y voy por Yanquilandia / como un mendigo ciego, / implorando limosna / de un mendrugo de suelo: ¡mi leal infortunio / me sigue como un perro!” [“and I go through Yankeeland / like a

4

[Proletarian Culture] (1910-1959) and Cultura obrera [Worker Culture] (19111952). A study is awaited of the whole, and from which a list of Spanish workerist writers in the United States would come out, who today, with rare exceptions, are unknown, in addition to the collaboration in such newspapers of known pens. [See Montse Feu, herein]. On the Spanish bohemian poets, a group that began with the June 1854 revolution, and until the 1936 war, see my Spanish Poesía bohemia española. Temas y figuras.

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blind beggar, / pandhandling/ from bit of ground: my loyal misfortune / follows me like a dog!”]. Accustomed to wandering through cafes and taverns in Madrid, he left us this image of the New York coffee shops: Cafés llamados “Cafeterías”: sin cómodos divanes para dejar el tiempo “tumbados a la bartola,”

y sin grandes espejos en las paredes . . . ¡Y en el aire un polvillo letal para las ratas de las tertulias . . .

Cafés called “Coffeeshops” without comfortable divans to leave time “lying down carelessly,”

and without big mirrors on the walls . . . And in the air some lethal dust for the chat room rats . . .

It is significant that one of the last verses of our historical Bohemians was a tribute to Edgar Allan Poe, the first of the great Symbolist and Bohemian poets, entitled “El cuervo de Edgar Poe” [“Edgar Poe’s Raven”]; written in one of those sordid bars along the New York neighborhoods, which the great Poe also frequented in the 19th century: “Deep sad taverns / always with half a door / the street closed . . .”. And I quote his last verses: Y en el fondo, siempre sin luz, el cuervo de Edgar Poe en una jaula graznando: “¡Whisky! ´¡Whisky”: en vez de: “¡Nunca más!, ¡nunca más!”. . . [And deep down, always without light, Edgar Poe’s raven in a cage squawking: “Whiskey! Whiskey: instead of: “Never again! Never again! . . .]

Upon arrival, and signed “Ellis Island, 1939”, Alfonso Vidal y Planas, in another poem in the book had expressed that desire of so many exiles and, also, of many emigrants: “ENTERRARME en España, cu-

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ando muera / (¡por caridad hermanos, en mi España!)”5 [“BURY ME in Spain, when I die / (for charity, brothers, in my Spain!)”] (Cirios en los rascacielos / Altar Candles on Skyscrapers). My fellow classmate, the aforementioned Manolo de la Nuez, told me when he was a child, Alfonso Vidal y Planas gave Spanish classes, at the Hispanas Confederadas premises, to the children of immigrants.

The Republican Priest Leocadio Lobo: “A Great Heart without Restraint” He arrived from exile in New York in February 1939, suspended from his ecclesiastical mission. Born in 1887, he died in New York in June 1959. I didn’t get to know him, but I did hear a lot about him, because, after being reinstated as a priest in 1947, he did evangelical work among the neediest of the Puerto Rican community, similarly to the working priests from the postwar period in Europe and ahead of so many of the later from the Second Vatican Council and their support for “God is with the poor.” For such work, already carried out in Spain, he was known by the expression “a great unbridled heart.” During the war, Lobo the priest gained international notoriety, as he published in London, in 1937, a pamphlet, Primate and Priest, which was a respectful repudiation, point by point, of La Carta Colectiva del Episcopado Español [The Collective Letter of the Spanish Episcopate] (July 1937), drawn up by Cardinal Isidre Gomà, which presented the rebellion of the military as a “saving crusade” against atheism and Communism, presided over by Franco, “Caudillo of God and for Spain”. Father Lobo pointed out that, from the beginning, the military rebel-

5

He died in Tijuana, where he found a good welcome and accommodation, to which he dedicated a tribute in a statement, on October 1, 1962, where he concludes: “¡Tierra leve y bien mullida la mexicana para el eterno reposo de mis huesos, tremendamente rendidos! . . .” [“Mild and soft Mexican land for the eternal rest of my bones, tremendously rendered! . . .”] (Cirios en los rascacielos / Altar Candles on Skyscrapers).

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lion was Fascist and wondered why the anger of the Christians was not directed against Fascism, which, like Communism, was totalitarian, anti-individualist and anti-Christian (9). In his early years in New York, he worked dubbing Hollywood movies and participated, in 1942, in a representation of El Alcalde de Zalamea [The Mayor of Zalamea] in the theater of Sociedades Hispanas Confederadas, where he collaborated extensively. He would later emerge as the protagonist in a chapter, “La caída” [“The Fall”], in the third installment of “La llama” [“The Flame”], in La forja de un rebelde [The Forging of a Rebel] by Arturo Barea: “. . . fue un sacerdote católico, y de todos a quienes he encontrado a través de nuestra guerra, es el hombre para quien guardo mi mayor amor y respeto; don Leocadio Lobo” [“he was a Catholic priest, and among all I met during our war, he is the man for whom I keep my greatest love and respect; Mr. Leocadio Lobo”] (301-302). And regarding how much he helped him, through his conversations, during his moral psychic “fall”, Barea quotes some key phrases, words that would later mark his renowned novel: “Sufre y aguántate pero no te encierres en ti mismo y comiences a dar vueltas dentro. Habla y escribe lo que tú creas que sabes, lo que has visto y pensado, cuéntalo hondamente con toda tu verdad . . .” [“Suffer and endure but do not close yourself in and begin to spin inside. Speak and write what you think you know, what you have seen and thought, tell it deeply with all your truth . . .”] (305).6

Eloy Vaquero, Former Minister of the Republican Government and Poet of Cante Jondo in New York He lived in a rather precarious situation, very similar to that of the liberal exiles at the time of Ferdinand VII in New York, Philadelphia, London or Paris, doing translations and / or giving private Spanish

6

We now have a recent and extensive essay on his life and work, written by José Luis González Gullón, Leocadio Lobo, un sacerdote republicano (1887-1959) [Leocadio Lobo, a Republican Priest (1887-1959)]. Nevertheless, the essay carries little information about his life and activities in New York.

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lessons,7 and enduring hardships. In New York we knew him with the aura of having been a minister of the Republic. He was hardly seen around the academic exiles’ social circle. He participated in the Hispanic literary scene in New York City, as a founding member of a so-called Circle of Ibero-American Poets and Writers, which had its gathering in a bar, the “Gold Rail”, on Broadway, on the corner of 110th Street, that I attended, and where I met him, on occasions. Linked to that literary group, Eloy Vaquero, along with much younger Odón Betanzos, founded a magazine, Mensajes [Messages], and a publishing house of the same name. He cultivated Andalusian poetic popular songs along the lines of the Machado brothers, Lorca and Alberti. As a poet from Córdoba “on the plane”, his Sendas Sonoras [Talking Paths], published in 1951, opens with “Rimas de Cante Jondo” [“Cante Jondo Rhyme”] and concludes with an “Appendix”: “El decir y el cantar de mi pueblo” [“My People’s Saying and Singing”]. Among his couplets, so close to the popular ones, we find, as in Juan Ramón and Alberti, the contrasting of places where he travels or resides in exile with the lost memories from his Andalusia. In “Nostalgias,” after having written “¡Años como siglos! ¡Lejos! / ¡Siempre venerando a España en un altar de Recuerdos!” [“Years like centuries! Far! / Always venerating Spain on an altar of Memories!”], he gives us some couplets with the dates and places where exile took him:

7

1936 Londres Anoche en la calle Oxford, a un claro de sobra y luna, vi la Plazuela del Potro.

1937, Abril Ayer se me apareció mi casita la del pueblo al entrar en Nueva York

1936 London Last night on Oxford Street,

1937, April Yesterday appeared

Born in Montalbán (Córdoba), from a young age he was interested in politics and social causes. Between 1918 and 1923, he wrote several books about Andalusian subjects, delving into his land and folklore. Del Drama de Andalucía, Las Escuelas al aire libre, Hieles del paro [About Drama in Andalusia, Outdoor Schools, Unemployment Bitterness (Poems in Andalusian lingua)].

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Through a clearing of shadow and moon, my small hometown house I saw the Horse Square when I got to New York

Senda sonora ends with the song to Aphrodite, his version, in verse, of “El nacimiento de Venus” [“The Birth of Venus”] by Sandro Botticelli, but instead of being blonde and coming out of the sea, he sings her riding the New York Subway, and colored. He goes on with a long description of her, from “los leves lindos pies hasta la venusina cabeza” [“the light pretty feet up to the Venusian head”] and, wondering about “aquella forma excelsa, / aquella celestial / hermosísima negra!” [“that exalted form, / that heavenly / most beautiful black woman!”] he revolts against racism, still so prevalent in the country, writing: “Oh quizás va en retorno a su país de Arkansas / en donde por su raza la desprecian!” [“Oh maybe she is going back to her Arkansas country / where for her race she is despised!”] (101).8 This is a remarkable coincidence for Spanish poets in New York, with García Lorca’s “Oda al rey de Harlem” [“Ode to the King of Harlem”], a prisoner in his superintendent suit, Vidal y Planas’s “Afrodita ideal de Cielo y Bronce” [“Sky and Bronze Ideal Aphrodite”] and the black “El nacimiento de Venus” by Eloy Vaquero. In Sendas sonoras, the author announced a series of works to be published, adding this pathetic note: “Estas obras esperan, hace años, para ver la luz, a que el poeta tenga unos meses en que las tareas de ganarse la vida no le agobien” [“These works have been waiting, for years, to see the light, until the poet has a few months in which the daily make a living chores do not overwhelm him”] (125). Months after writing this, and under such stress, Eloy Vaquero died in 1960, at the age of 72.

8

Here we would have, within Spanish poetry, and with this poem to the “hermosísima negra” [“most beautiful black woman”], the thematic overcoming of that stanza of the Canto espiritual [Spiritual Hymn] by San Juan de la Cruz: “No quieras despreciarme, / que, si color moreno en mi hallaste, / ya bien puedes mirarme / después que me miraste, / que gracia y hermosura en mi dejaste” [“Don’t despise me, /if you found brown color in me, / You can as well look at me / after you looked at me, / since you left in me grace and beauty”].

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Visit to a Defeated Republican General I did have the opportunity to meet one of those soldiers who remained loyal to the Republic, general Asensio from A Coruña (José Asensio Torrado, 1892-1961), who had been at the forefront of the assault on the Cuartel de la Montaña [Mountain Barracks] in Madrid. Promoted to general, he led other losing battles, such as Talavera and the siege of the Alcázar of Toledo. Due to political-military intrigues, he was nicknamed “the general of defeats”, demoted from his position, and sent as a military attaché to the embassy in Washington. From there, he went into exile to New York, where he lived teaching Spanish and other related tasks. I gratefully recall a visit I paid him one hot, humid day in the Summer of 1960. He had invited me to lunch, welcoming me with generous hospitality, in his modest apartment on 50th Street. In the little dining room were the stocky ex-general, wearing a t-shirt given the oppressive heat, his Cuban wife served us the tasty meal, while a canary, in its cage hanging on the window, accompanied the conversation with its tweets. The only things missing were el porrón y el botijo [the glass drinking decanter and the clay water container] in order to relive a Spanish genre scene in the middle of New York. Drinking good Cuban flavorful coffee, and appearing to me as in one of the photos of the war, in which I had seen him in his military uniform while directing some military operation, the “defeated general”, sweating, told me, pointing out places, names and distances, how if this or that military strategy of his had been adopted, the war would have been won. Despite his apparent robustness, he did not live for many months after such a visit, since he passed away at 69 in 1961.

“Free Spain”. . . but in New York. A Couple of Activists: Jesús González Malo and Carmen Aldecoa We were a lot closer to Carmen Aldecoa, since, when we studied the M.A., she was the NYU teacher who coordinated the language cours-

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es that we taught. She frequently invited us to her apartment, around the corner from the University. There I would go, with, among others, the already aforementioned Andrés Franco and Alfredo Matilla Rivas, who, years later, published his novel El españolito y el espía [The Little Spaniard and the Spy], where he evoked his childhood growing up with a group of exiles in Santo Domingo. The spy turned out to be the Basque Jesús Galíndez, who was at the service of the CIA and the FBI, and ended up assassinated at the hands of the dictator Trujillo. The Anarcho-syndicalist from Santander, Jesús González Malo, a lathe operator, after leaving the workshop would go home, change his clothes, have a quick dinner with his wife (some afternoons we accompanied them) and would go to work until late at night. He directed and edited almost alone the weekly España Libre [Free Spain] (between 1961-1965). During one of those trips, at the end of 1965, he had a heart attack and died. España Libre was a unifying organ for the opposition to the Franco regime inside the United States; it had the collaboration of several prestigious exiled writers and cartoonists. “Chus”, González Malo, was also the author of a voluminous book, published in Buenos Aires, with a title and theme which challenged La rebelión de las masas [The Revolt of the Masses], by Ortega y Gasset: La incorporación de las masas [The Incorporation of the Masses] (1951). There, you can also see Carmen Aldecoa’s hands, one of that group of exiled teachers who maintained a continuous political activity in exile, playing an important role in the Sociedades Hispanas Confederadas, and in the so vital Asociación de Ayuda a los refugiados españoles [Association to Help the Spanish Refugees] (SRA), formed in New York in 1952 by Nancy Macdonald, whose history was written in her book Homage to the Spanish Exiles. Voices (those of refugees, mainly in France) from the Spanish Civil War (1987). The list of international intellectuals and artists who sponsored or formed the SRA Board of Directors is impressive. Pablo Casals and Salvador de Madariaga were Honorary Presidents. Among such VIPs, and to name a few: Albert Camus and his wife Francine, Noam Chomsky, Waldo Frank, Erich Fromm, George Orwell’s widow, Ignacio Silone and Barbara Prost Solamon. As presidents, in addition to the founder, the well-known thinker, Hannah Arendt and the conse-

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crated novelist, Mary MacCarthy. Spaniards, in addition to Carmen Aldecoa, who were part of the SRA, were Amparo Granell, Rocío Linz, Francisco García Lorca, Juan Marichal, Ramón Sender, José Luis Sert and José Yglesias. When opening the founder’s book, the dedication is headed with the name of Carmen Aldecoa, with the words, “my Spanish mentor”. And at the end, on page 337, a photograph of her appears, with a smile and a jovial face, already living back in Spain in 1983. At the bottom of the photo, we read: “Carmen Aldecoa, my friend and guide to the New Spain”, since she was traveling with her through Spain on those dates, trying to ease the procedures for the payment of pensions to the disabled in exile. In 1984 she founded a new “Amigos de los Antiguos Refugiados españoles” [“Friends of the Former Spanish Refugees”] (AARE), which found little echo in the Spanish government and in the trade unions. For them, the living invalid elderly refugees were then a thing of the past. [Muñoz-Rojas Ritama, and Alicia Alted Vigil. Los Olvidados del Exilio: Cartas de los últimos refugiados españoles. Madrid: Reino de Cordelia, 2021.] In 1957, Carmen Aldecoa published, in Mexico, her book Del sentir y pensar [On Feeling and Thinking]. Among the various essays, “Herramientas y letras” [“Tools and Letters”], stands out: an extensive study on working-class literature, from before the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century, where she provides titles for books, magazines, and lists authors. I believe, now, that my interest in workingclass literature could, to a large extent, have been inspired by my dealings with Carmen Aldecoa and Jesús González Malo “the Good.”

Patricio P. Escobal, Defender and Captain of Real Madrid Soccer Team, an Industrial Engineer and Author of Las Sacas [The Purges]: Testimony of the Exterminations in Franco’s Prisons Along with his wife, Teresa Castroviejo, another of those valuable exiled women —sister of the most prestigious ophthalmologist Ramón Castroviejo— they were a couple who greatly encouraged those meet-

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ings of exiled academics and professionals. Linked to the Left Republican Party, like so many other middle-class intellectual and professional progressives, at the outbreak of the war he was an engineer at the Logroño city hall, their hometown; they were both from wellknown families in the city, and he was as a popular footballer for Real Madrid and Logroñés. None of the above prevented the fact that four days after the uprising, and after the quick overtaking of Logroño (the province was occupied with hardly any resistance), he was imprisoned and about to be liquidated. Of this horrifying experience, Patricio Pedro Escobal has left us an extensive memory and fictional testimony, first in English, Death Row: Spain 1936, from 1968, and later in Spanish, in New York, under the title Las Sacas (1974), printed by the aforementioned publishing house, Mensaje [Message] created by Eloy Vaquero and Odón Betanzos Palacios, whose father, an honest worker, had, in the war, the same tragic end of so many of those who appear / disappear in this book. At the time of the crisis and agony of the Franco regime, the fictional testimony made people to relive and feel the bloody and brutally repressive origins of the regime. Paul Preston, in The Spanish Holocaust. Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain (2012), uses Patricio Escobal, saying that, largely thanks to him, as a survivor, the experience of the Republican prisoners in Logroño is known (187). It devotes two and a half pages to what happened in those prisons and in the province of Logroño, under a terrible repression, which, in six months, left a balance of nearly two thousand people executed (186-188). Those six months of criminal debauchery occupy 302 pages in Las sacas, narrating the experience and suffering lived in the overcrowded different places of the city, set up as prisons, in the provincial jail and in the hospital, where Patricio Escobal circulated.9 The moments which

9

After several months in prison, Escobal was suffering from Pott’s disease, a vertebral tuberculosis, which was immobilizing him, and which he suffered for more than three years. Thanks to the intercession of some Italian officers and General Gámbara, who resided in a farm owned by relatives of the couple and

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he describes to us —among them, the simulacrum of his own firing squad sacking— are overwhelming: the terror he felt fearing that any night they were going to take him in one of the night sacas, since he was on such lists; how they took out so many of those who shared a cell with him: “55 in 5 days,” in the cinema-jai-alai Avenida, turned into an overcrowded prison, as he wrote on one occasion. While the Franco side was talking about fighting the communists, among the many crowded into one of the prisons, there was only one prisoner from the communist party, Escobal tells us. It makes a deep and sad impression to hear him talking to one or more of the incarcerated, and, after turning several pages, to learn that they have already been executed. It is also very emotional, as in the concentration and extermination camps of the Second World War, to hear, feel, that it was narrating and telling their stories among one another that gave the prisoners the strength to endure the terrible repression and face the end that was waiting for many of them. The pages of Las sacas are full of such stories.

AND NOW TO END: Rendezvous wih Spain, Bernardo Clariana Born in 1912, he was one of the most versatile, multifaceted and restless of that group of writers, artists and professors from exile in New York. He passed through Santo Domingo, and Cuba —where he published his first collection of poems Ardiente deshacer [Ardent Undoing]— until arriving in the United States, where, at the beginning, he came to teach at a university, Middlebury College, in the state of Vermont, as he himself presents in a poem: “. . .Y explicando

who established a friendship with the respective families, in October 1937, for his cure, he obtained a provisional commutation of prison for a confinement in Pedernales, a town on the Basque coast, where he remained, in a wheeled bed, until the Spring of 1940 when (finally!) his trial of false and fabricated charges was dismissed. In June, the couple left for New York.

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al Arcipreste junto a la raya / del Canadá perdido en la nevada / me da aún por soñar en los cuentos de corzas y de hadas” [“. . . While interpreting the Archpriest next to the Canadian border/ lost in the snow / let me still dream about tales of deer and fairies”]. Perhaps to continue these dreams, outside of the academic classrooms and stop feeling “perdido en la Nevada” [“lost in the snow”], he left that place and teaching, taking refuge in the “fábrica de sueños” [“dream factory”] of Hollywood, dubbing for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and living in New York from translations and journalism. Having settled in a small apartment within the bohemian aura neighborhood, Greenwich Village, he frequented Italian restaurants and bars, where painters and artists gathered; in one of them, he held his gatherings with Leocadio Lobo, Francisco García Lorca, Esteban Vicente and others from the group. Unfortunately, on a trip to France in 1962, while bathing in a river, he drowned at the age of 50. His work covers different genres, poetry, narrative and essays. As a Latinist, he put great effort, and care, into his translations of Catullus; publishing a beautiful book about him, with illustrations by José Vela Zanetti, with whom he had already lived in Santo Domingo. As finishing touches to his poetic work,10 where political forms undertake artistic overtones, I highlight two artistic, brief, notebooks: Ardentissima cura,11 and Rendez vous with Spain. This second notebook, on its the cover, contains extraordinary drawings by another of those great painters linked to the exile, Julio de Diego: a whole colorful mixture of figures, reminiscent of the apocalyptic “Jardín de las Delicias” [“The Garden of Earthly

10 Today we have his Poesía completa, with a critical edition and notes, by Manuel Aznar Soler and Victoria María Sueiro Rodríguez. 11 Both printed by the same small artistic publisher, Gemor, thanks to the famous Anaïs Nin, and translated by Dudley Fitts. The first, Ardentissima Cura, is also an original, beginning with two verses of “Grito hacia Roma” [“Screaming towards Rome”] from [García Lorca’s] Poeta en Nueva York [Poet in New York], “El hombre que desprecia la paloma debía hablar, / debía gritar desnudo entre las columnas” [“The man who despises the dove should speak, / should cry out naked between the columns”], while enunciating to the “Holy Father” a statement such as: “Católicos del mundo / Execrad al nazismo” [“Catholics of the world / Let’s execrate Nazism”].

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Delights”] by Bosch, with extravagant touches of military, Phalangists, ecclesiastics, turned into outlandish animals, unleashing the infernal warlike labyrinth evoked by these images. Each painting occupies a page, across from one in prose narration or poetry songs, rendering, with ironic and steely expression, such an “apocalyptic reality”, verbalizing what is painted and vice versa. There is a joyous nonchalance, both in the paintings and in the text, in such a grotesque representation of a regime that, in those dates 1944-1946, it was believed the Allies were going to force out, given their ties and services, during the Second World War, to the German-Italian-Japanese Fascist Axis. At the end of this journey, I have limited myself to transcribing what we read / heard in the last two pages of the twelve that make up this so artistic Rendezvous with Spain; something that can resonate today with a strong echo, in light of the eviction of Franco’s tomb from the “Valley of the Fallen.” First it is written: “. . . Así, igual como los ojos de este héroe popular de muestro Romancero, se cerraron para siempre innumerables puños republicanos. Oíd lo que dijo Franco, montando en la última tumba” [“. . . Thus, just like the eyes of this popular hero from our Traditional Ballads, countless Republican fists forever shut themselves off. Hear what Franco said, riding on the last grave.”] And we listen to the dictator with his “voz aflautada” [“piping voice”], who then says: “. . . Las cárceles son las viviendas / del obrero. Ya no hay huelgas. / Que se cierren las escuelas. / Vayan todos a la iglesia” [“. . . Prisons are the worker’s houses / There are no more strikes. / Schools are to be closed. /Everyone should go to church”]: ¡Arriba España! ¿No oís Que he dicho arriba España? A ver ese muerto, ¡arriba! A ver ese preso, ¡arriba! A ver esa viuda, ¡arriba!

Al que no diga ¡arriba España! Lo fusilo en el acto (Pum, pum, pum. Pum) ¡Que bien levantar al morir, La mano arriba!

Go Spain! Can’t you hear Those who don’t say go Spain! That I said Go Spain I’ll shoot them on the spot Let’s see that dead one, go! (Bang, bang, bang. Bang) Let’s see that prisoner, go! So good to go with a rising hand, Let’s see that widow, go! when dying!

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Works Cited Aldecoa, Carmen. Del sentir y pensar. Ciudad de México: CostaAmic, 1956. Barea, Arturo. La forja de un rebelde. III. La Llama. Buenos Aires: Losada, 1954. Carroll, Peter. N and Fernández, James D. Facing Fascism. New York and The Spanish Civil War. New York: Museum of the City of New York/New York University Press, 2007. Clariana, Bernardo. Ardentissima Cura. Translated by Dudley Fitts. New York: Gemor Press, 1944. — Rendezvous with Spain. Translated by Dudley Fitts, illustrated by Julio de Diego. New York: Gemor Press, 1946. — Poesía completa. Edited by Manuel Aznar Soler and Victoria María Sueiro Rodríguez. Valencia: Instituciò Alfons el Magnanìn, 2005. Escobal, Patricio. Death Row: Spain 1936. Translated by Tania de Gámez. Indianapolis: The Bobbs Merril Company, 1968. — Las Sacas. New York: Mensaje, 1974. Fernández, James D. “New York. The Spanish-Speaking Community Responds.” Facing Fascism. New York and The Spanish Civil War, edited by Peter Carroll and James D. Fernández, New York: Museum of the City of New York/New York University Press, 2007, pp. 84-91. — and Luis Argeo (eds.). Invisible Immigrants. Spaniards in the USA (1868-1945). np: Fracaso Books, 2014. Fuentes, Víctor. Bio-Grafía americana. Valladolid: Fundación Jorge Guillén, 2008. González Gullón, José. “Leocadio Lobo, un Sacerdote republicano (1887-1959).” Hispania Sacra 62.125, Jan.-June (2010), pp. 267-309. González Malo, Jesús. La incorporación de las masas. Buenos Aires: America lee, 1952. Lobo, Leocadio. Vicar of San Ginés, Madrid. Primate and Priest. Washington D.C: Department of Press of the Spanish Embassy, 1937. Macdonald, Nancy. Homage to the Spanish Exiles. Voices from the Spanish Civil War. New York: Insight Books, 1987.

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Malina, Judith. The Diaries of Judith Malina 1947-1957. New York: Grove, 1984. Matilla-Rivas, Alfredo. El españolito y el espía. San Juan de Puerto Rico: Isla Negra, 1999. Preston, Paul. The Spanish Holocaust. Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain. New York: W.W Morton and Company, 2012. Vaquero, Eloy. Senda sonora. New York: Las Américas, 1959. — Rimas del Cante Jondo. Córdoba: Demófilo, 1984. Vidal y Planas, Alfonso. Cirios en los rascacielos. Litografía de Baja California, 1963.

Marysa Navarro-Aranguren and Víctor Fuentes.

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A Conversation with Noam Chomsky Juan Uriagereka José María Naharro-Calderón (University of Maryland) Oct 23, 2019 Transcription: Nélida Devesa Gómez and José María Naharro-Calderón

Prof. Naharro-Calderón: Dear Prof Chomsky, we are so thankful for you to be with us today sharing your thoughts about this story, which is certainly History: although it is still here. As you know, tomorrow [October 24, 2019], there will be an entombment [Franco’s] in what I call The Uncivil Mountain, the Valley of the Fallen near Madrid. Maybe we want to talk about that at the end. But first of all, in 1939, you wrote your first article about the Fascist and Francoist troops coming into Barcelona. Can you tell us what prompted you to write that? What did the Spanish Civil War mean to you and to the USA at that time? Prof. Chomsky: Well, this was March 1939, shortly after the fall of Barcelona. I was fourth-grade newspaper editor. Probably nobody read it, maybe my mother, I’m not sure. And I’m sure the article was not very memorable. The only thing I remember from it, which has

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just stuck in my mind for the last 80 years, has been the first sentence which answers your question. The first sentence was: “Austria falls, and Czechoslovakia falls. Toledo falls, now Barcelona falls.” And it went on to say something, probably not very memorable, about the apparently inexorable spread of Fascism over Europe. I was old enough to be able to listen to Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies. Not understanding the words, but the mood was unmistakable. I have to say that when I listen these days to Trump’s rallies before his adoring crowds, very unpleasant memories come back. Fascists without the ideology. At the time I had been following at a ten-year-old level what was happening in Europe, in particular in Spain, which was a special interest for whatever reason, I don’t remember. Shortly after that, in my early teens, I lived in Philadelphia, about 100 miles from New York. There was a train from Philadelphia to New York when I was about twelve years old, and my parents allowed me to go by myself to New York to visit relatives. And I wandered in anarchist offices and bookstores. The Freie Arbeiter Stimme1 office was in Union Square down in those days. If any of you know New York, down Fourth Avenue, which has since been gentrified, there were lots of second hand bookstores: many of them turned out to be run by Spanish emigres, many anarchist communities. And they were very happy both at the office and the bookstores to talk to a young teenager who was fascinated by their experiences. That’s where I picked up lots of pamphlets. By now, many of them are available, but they weren’t available for many years. A lot of important literature about the anarchist revolution, about the USA role in facilitating the Fascist attack, which was suppressed in the press at the time. Also, I was lucky that the main library, main downtown library in Philadelphia, happened to have a very large collection of left-wing materials of all kind. I spent lots of Saturdays there, mulling through all sorts of stuff and learnt quite a bit about it that I didn’t know at the time I wrote. So for example, I was unaware, it was unreported or denied

1

Yiddish-language anarchist newspaper published from New York City’s Union Square between 1890 and 1977.

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that the Roosevelt administration was directly involved in supporting the Fascist attack and leaders, quietly conceded many years later in declassified material, but denied or even disregarded at the time. And I was able to learn something about the experiences in the collectives in some of the original documents, collectivization documents, studies mostly in Spanish and Catalan, which I kind of made up, more or less, not really knowing the languages of the reports of what was happening. It was a major educational experience. But at the time, and it did seem at the time, as if the spread of Fascism was unstoppable. And it was that way with very local experiences. We happened to live in a section of Philadelphia that was mostly Irish, Irish Catholic and German. We were the only Jewish family there. And it was very highly anti-Semitic. Irish kids came out of the local Jesuit school: they were raving anti-Semites. It took a couple of hours for them to calm down, people on the streets and that sort of thing. I mean, I can actually remember beer parties when Paris fell. And rather strikingly, on December 7, 1941, all of the same people were appearing with tin hats, waving flags, American flags, then telling you to pull down your blinds at night, because maybe there’ll be a German air raid, and that sort of thing. Turned very quickly. But anyway, I was reinforced or it gave personal meaning to the news, the very frightening news about the successes of the Fascist War, of course, we didn’t know it at the time, and it hasn’t been learned until quite recently. But the American government, it turns out, had the same assessment in 1939. The State Department and the Council on Foreign Relations, which is a major private institution dealing with foreign affairs, set up a program, a war-peace studies program, which ran from 1939 till 1945, assessing what the post-war world would be. And there, it turns out in the early period, 1939 till 42, or roughly, they had the same concerns that I could just pick up as a young teenager: they assumed, they took for granted, that the USA would emerge from the war as a world domi-

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nant power. And they laid plans for the post-war world on that basis. They constructed what was called a grand area, which the USA would dominate, including the Western Hemisphere, the former British Empire, which the USA would take over, and the Far East. And the German-run world, which would include much of Europe and much of Eurasia. By 1942-43, after the Battle of Stalingrad, and particularly the huge tank battle of Kursk, it appeared that the Russians would defeat the Germans, and in fact, it is not particularly well known in the United States, that the Russians fought alone almost the entire war against the Germans, right to the end. Of course, the plan changed at that time, that there wouldn’t be a German-held world but a Russian-dominated part of the world. And the grand area was expanded to include as much of Eurasia as the USA and Britain could take over. But then, they would be able to take over, certainly, all of Western Europe and the industrial heartland of Eurasia. That was the secret government plan of the time, you could sort of make it out. In my personal experience, I must say that I was pretty skeptical about the war against the Germans: a war that simply had to be fought. They were horrible beyond words. The war against Japan was a much more mixed affair. Later, much more of the wartime propaganda was highly misleading. I’m sure you’re aware that the wartime propaganda depicted the enemy as the most grotesque villains in human history, but the Japanese were subjected to far more racist propaganda than the Germans. The Germans were sort of law-abiding people like us —something went wrong under Hitler— but the Japanese were absolute vermin: you could just smash and destroy them. In fact, even before Pearl Harbor, it was public in the newspapers, not secret, that the USA was shipping B-17s, the big bombers of the day, to Manila, to prepare to bomb, what were called the anti-sandwich, the Japanese enemy. [Inaudible] The Japanese could read this in public documents, they did not need secrets: they could read it in the newspapers. Also, it wasn’t obvious enough at the time, both facts came out later, that the Western empires, mainly the British, but then following them, the Dutch and the French, and the US, had closed off the entire imperial system to Japanese competition, as a rule in favor of free trade. It was clear they were going to win. But as soon as they couldn’t

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compete with Japanese industrial competition, they simply closed off the Empire, followed by the other imperial powers like Holland, the United States . . . The Philippines were simply closed to Japan, but they were Japan’s markets and sources of raw materials. It was clear that something was going to happen. And what the Japanese in fact did, by our standards, it doesn’t really amount to much: the famous day which will live in infamy, December 7. It happened to be my 13th birthday: they bombed military bases in two USA colonies. Okay, not nice, but not the worst crime in human history, considering the background, and then what followed was pretty atrocious. I mean, I won’t go through it. Meanwhile, about I think 40,000 Spanish refugees who fled to the hemisphere, mostly to Mexico. But some did come to the United States, the ones I was able to meet and learn and talk to in New York in the early 1940s. But that’s basically the background. Prof. Naharro-Calderón: If I may follow up on your discussion about the USA involvement in Asia, there is a character at that time, who was very close to one of our prominent exiles, Juan Ramón Jiménez. And that was Henry Wallace, the Vice President in the 1941-45 Roosevelt Administration. What are your thoughts about Henry Wallace? Prof. Chomsky: Well, I actually supported him in the 1948 election. He ran as a third party candidate. I thought he was the best of the three, and support didn’t amount to much. I wrote a couple of articles about it. One of them, I should say, unfortunately I didn’t save, was in Arabic. I was studying Arabic at the time, and I figured I’d try to write a campaign article that was in Arabic. That would never get out of my bedroom, actually where it was. But he was undermined by Truman and the liberal press. He was in favor of what we now call détente, some steps towards accommodation with the Soviet Union, with China, and he was just written out of it. He was also some kind of a Social Democrat: he was in favor of domestically extending the New Deal. He was one of the leading figures in the New Deal, he wanted to carry it forward. There was a big attack against Labor in the late 40s. A very powerful attack. The class war was on hold during the

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Second War, but it broke out very quickly afterwards: there were big strikes and a harsh repression. Strong legislation. Wallace was one of the few, in the administration and out of it, who was opposing this and supporting labor rights and the rights of agricultural workers: he was very interested in agriculture. But he was simply written out of the political system very quickly. That was the period that’s called McCarthyism. McCarthy was the leading figure of what was actually started by Truman a couple of years earlier, with a lot of red-baiting efforts in the government to weed out the people who might be sympathetic Communists. Truman himself was a controversial figure: he happened to love Stalin, Uncle Joe, as he called him. He said he was just like the kind of politician that Truman remembered from his days in Missouri in local politics. And good old Uncle Joe was being misled by the Politburo. But if he could get out of those constraints, then he and Truman could get along fine. And, Truman added, as long as Truman got his way 80% of the time. Truman’s staff had to silence him because of some of the extreme pro-Stalin statements he was making. At the same time, Truman initiated what became a really obscured era, picked up later by McCarthy, sort of known under his name. In the early McCarthy period he was supported: it was only when he made a mistake, and turned against people even more powerful than he was that he got smashed: the USA Army . . . Prof. Uriagereka: Before we move on fully into McCarthyism, I wanted to hear your thoughts on Non-Intervention in the, you know, late 30s and early 1940s. And what do you make of that, in particular, in connection to how Non-Intervention worked in the rest of history up to now. Prof. Chomsky: Non-Intervention is a very strange term in the context of war. Of course, Germany and Italy were openly involved in arming and even fighting for the Fascists. The Communists and Stalin supported the Republic, as long as he thought that he could make a deal with the West, an antifascist deal with the West. When it became clear that that wasn’t going to work, they simply pulled out, and took about half the [Spanish Republican] Treasury within. The West,

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theoretically, was committed to Non-Intervention. What that meant in practice was, for just to give you an illustration: a small American bussinessman who tried to send some guns to the [Spanish] Republic, was sentenced for the crime, he was bitterly condemned by Roosevelt as a traitor, for violating our Non-Intervention, and pledges, and so on. At the very same time, the Texaco Oil Company, which was run then by an open Fascist, and which had contracts to provide oil to the Republic, switched them and sold oil to the Fascists. That was the one crucial commodity that Hitler and Mussolini couldn’t provide. So that was quite essential. This was exposed in the Left Wing press in the late 1930s. I learned about it reading [inaudible] and lifting papers at the time. It was mentioned in the mainstream [press], but it was officially denied by the government. And that ended it. Many years later, it was conceded that it was true. That has a striking resonance many years later, and almost in the same way, speaking of NonIntervention. Haiti in 1990 had its first free election ever. The election was won by a radical priest, a populist priest: Jean Baptiste Aristide. It amazed everyone. The USA was supporting a candidate who was from the World Bank and had huge resources, all the media, and everything else. And nobody could believe, nobody even paid attention to the grassroots organizing that was going on in the slums and in the hills. And everyone was adamant that Aristide’s candidacy actually won the election. Well, immediately, preparations began for a coup. The USA made it very clear it was not going to support the coup. It was called Non-Intervention. Seven months later, a military coup took place, which restored a regime of extreme terror. And Clinton came in at that point, and again, pursued Non-Intervention. I visited during the days of the terror, unbelievable [inaudible]. I was never as terrified in my life. When you were walking around Port-au-Prince, the main city, you could see terminals being built to collect oil. Meanwhile, the CIA was testifying in Congress that the USA policies were good policies in blocking oil shipments. You could see them there in the city. Well, finally Clinton decided that there had been enough terror, and he ended it, and arranged and tried to impose a kind of a client regime which would be compelled to adopt extremely harsh neoliberal principles, which killed rice production, and benefited the

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grain and arms’ producers in the States, and so on. But he did send in the Marines. Well, when it was clear that the Marines were going to come in, it was announced publicly, virtuously. So of course, all the press was looking at the humanitarian intervention in sending the Marines to save the Haitians from the terror we were supporting. The day before, I happened to be able, at that time, to monitor the wire to the Associated Press. Stuff is constantly pouring out from all over the world. But they usually have a lead story. And they have a notice to editors saying this is the lead story for tomorrow. And it keeps repeating: you can’t miss it. The lead story was the USA Treasury Department had been authorizing the Texaco Oil Company to provide oil to the military junta which was spreading the terror. I was naive. I wrote an article at the time about the Marines’ intervention. And I barely mentioned this, I assumed it would be major news. The article came out, you know, seven weeks later. The news were suppressed, totally suppressed. To this day, almost nobody knows. Most of that’s almost a remarkable repetition, even in detail, of what happened in the late 30s: same oil company, same authorization by the government, same denial, same suppression by the media. And I see that’s not an unusual case of Non-Intervention, management designed and framed in such a way that it meets policy objectives in one form or the other. Prof. Naharro-Calderón: To follow up on Non-Intervention, of course, Spain was not the first one to suffer Non-Intervention. There was also Manchuria and Ethiopia, which actually made a sham of the League of Nations, an organization which was supposed to preserve world peace. Immediately, the main actors stepped in and decided what world peace was in their view. What has changed since that League of Nations, when we consider the United Nations and other organizations internationally today? Prof. Chomsky: Lots of names have changed. If you go back to the early 1930s, and the invasion of Ethiopia, the League of Nations did condemn it —the USA was not a member of the League, of course. But you have to remember that even though the League of Nations condemned it, the major powers, the United States, Britain, France,

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were not very critical of it. In fact, Mussolini was very highly regarded at the time, including by liberal America, Britain, even worse: the British were even more cynical than the Americans when they were running. Mr. Roosevelt, for example, described Mussolini as that admirable Italian gentlemen. A major business journal, Forbes magazine, had a special issue devoted to Mussolini’s achievements. Great they were. The title of the essay was: The Wasps are unwrapping themselves. Finally, the Wasps are getting their act together: under this group, the main business journal. But the support for Mussolini was quite widespread. And more interestingly, there was support for Hitler. In Britain, in the business community quite substantially, same in the United States. In fact, in 1937, the State Department described Hitler as a moderate, who was standing between the extremes of Right and Left, holding off the extreme, and parts of the Nazi movement. And of course, he’s smashing the Labor Unions and the Communists and all those bad people. So he’s kind of a moderate, and we should support him. It’s the absolute standard. Right into the present: the worst monsters are moderates, as long as you support them. Saddam Hussein was a moderate, strongly supported by the Reagan administration, by the Bush-1 administration, up until the time when he made a mistake. Suharto in Indonesia is one of the great killers of modern times, very few match him. He was our kind of guy, as the Clinton administration called him when they invited him to visit Washington in 1995, shortly before he was overthrown, and it’s consistent. Actually, the United States did not have an ambassador to Hitler’s Germany, but a consul [chargé d’affaires] in Berlin, [from 1938] up until Pearl Harbor. The [prior ambassador] was writing back statements to the State Department, saying basically: we shouldn’t be too hard on Hitler. This is after major atrocities. We shouldn’t be too hard on him, the press is a little too hard, sometimes. And sometimes, we should recognize that he has some good side. His name [Hugh R. Wilson 1885-1946] is one of the most prominent statesmen of the post war period, considered a dove thrown out of the Truman administration because he was too soft-hearted. That was the general attitude. So [nothing strange to] the fact that there was no serious action taken against the invasion of Ethiopia, the Anschluss, the Munich Agreement. Actually, Roosevelt

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sent his leading advisor to Munich, late 1938, Summer Wells. And Summer Wells came back from Munich saying: it’s a great achievement, we’ve laid the basis for peace in our time. This is when the Sudeten [in 1938]. Now we can go forward, you know, everything will be fine. And in fact, if you look at Hitler’s takeover of the Sudetenland, he was just overflowing with humanitarian settlements, I mean, the goal was to bring this area under the tutelage of the more advanced government of Germany, to settle ethnic conflicts, to lay the basis for development, and so on. It’s kind of amazing. When you look through internal records of the most grotesque regimes and compare them with the internal records of the Western democracies, they’re astonishingly similar. So you look through the whole rich record of discussion of, say, the invasion of Vietnam, as the worst crime since the Second World War. There’s one theme dominant —unless you adopt that theme, you’re not part of the discussion. The USA is doing everything with good intentions. It’s trying to establish democracy. Maybe it makes mistakes, but nothing could be wrong. We have the highest intentions: developing the countries, bringing freedom and democracy, even when you’re wiping them out with B-52 raids on heavily-populated areas, or dropping Agent Orange on their crops. It happens that when the Japanese were defeated, therefore, their internal documents were taken over by the West. The Rand Corporation, which is associated with the Air Force, published translations of Japanese counterinsurgency documents. They’re extremely interesting. I wrote about them back in the 1960s (1967). But the documents are very similar to American counterinsurgency documents at the same time, and their rhetoric. This is a time when Japan was carrying out the massacre in Nanjing, devastating Manchuria: hideous atrocities all over the place. These are internal discussions of Japanese military officers, diplomatic and military officers. They’re not intended as propaganda. They’re talking to each other. And they’re talking about how the Japanese are sacrificing blood and treasure in the interests of the Chinese. Their goal is to bring an earthly paradise to China: that was a term that was used to protect the poor Chinese people from Chinese bandits, terrorists who are assaulting them. That’s just so elevated [inaudible]. I wrote about it, pointing out how similar this was to USA

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counterinsurgency. The article had an interesting fate, my article. It was almost never mentioned anywhere. But there was one reference to it in the scholarly literature, cited as an interesting case of an analyst who was defending the Japanese by describing their hideous atrocities. But that’s the only way for a Western scholar to interpret the fact that I was comparing Japanese counterinsurgency to USA counterinsurgency. How else could you interpret it? Prof. Uriagereka: We only have a few minutes. So I would suggest in the interest of time to talk a little bit about Transition in the 70s in Iberia, in general. I like to think of Iberia (Portugal and Spain) as having interesting situations in the 1970s vis-à-vis Fascism and so on, with slight differences. So what’s your take on those moments? Because we only have a few minutes. Prof. Chomsky: Well, in Portugal, in particular, there was pretty promising Left take over for several years after the Salazar dictatorship was overthrown. Well, there were some promising developments in Portugal after the overthrow the dictatorship. In Spain, it was a slow process of accommodation. I was kind of struck by the long term effect of the dictatorship. So just to give you some personal examples. In 1990, I spent some time in Catalonia and other parts of Spain. I gave talks in Barcelona, for example, where I referred to events of 1936, like the attack on the Post Office [Telephone Building] in May 37, when the Communist-led reaction destroyed the anarchist revolution. I talked about that and assumed that everybody would know what I’m talking about. The only people who understood what I was talking about were people of my age. Younger people, no memory. I guess I gave some talks shortly after in Oviedo, and I referred to the 1934 uprising, which was crushed by proto-Fascist forces. And again, I didn’t give any details, I assume everybody would know all that: of course, same story. People my age kind of knew about it, nobody else. I found the same thing in Greece about fifteen years after the overthrow of the dictatorship in 1974: young people just didn’t know about it. I’ve seen the same in Brazil, recently. Young people simply do not know about the military dictatorship. These

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things just got somehow effaced from memory under Franco, and the entire memory of what happened was just wiped down. It took a long time for people to connect with themselves as an effect of Totalitarian propaganda. People in the West should not be so self-righteous about that: if you ask people in the United States questions about the Vietnam War, or the Iraq war, atrocities in Central America, nobody will know what you’re talking about. George Orwell had something to say about this. Everyone has read his Animal Farm, of course. But not many people have read the preface to Animal Farm. Because it was found many years later in his unpublished papers. The preface is addressed to the people of England. It says basically this book is a satire about the totalitarian enemy, but in England, free England, he says, I’m quoting now, unpopular ideas can be suppressed without the use of force. A few sentences of explanation: one reason is the press is owned by wealthy men who have every interest in having their ideas spread, but I think more importantly, he says a good factor is a good education. To have a good education you went to Oxford and Cambridge, you have instilled into you the understanding, the tacit understanding that there are certain things that are never said, and I would add, even thought. That’s basically Gramsci’s point. It becomes so instilled that you can’t even think it anymore. And that’s what Orwell called literary censorship in free societies and there are plenty of examples of that. Prof. Naharro-Calderón: From that point of view, I sometimes refer to what happened in Spain as a number of Non-Interventions: there was one in 1936. There was one in 1945. And to a certain extent, there was another in 1977 (1975-77), after somehow Franco had been gentrified as a decent grandfather that could pat his grandchildren, while still signing a few death sentences, and as we are still dealing with Crimes against Humanity in the unearthed mass graves from the political persecution and beyond. And eventually, we could come from that dictatorship into a democratic period. And indeed, we did, somehow. There were free elections. And a constitution was written and voted by the Spanish people. And of course, you know, we have now an open conflict over the Constitution. And one of the areas

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where we have the conflict is Catalonia. And my reading would be that we have two opposing forces: a very conservative, a non-moving reading of the Constitution, and maybe an over-extended reading of demos possibilities from Catalonia vs the rest of Spain. What is your reading in all of this? Prof. Chomsky: Well, there are a lot of complicated issues involved in the separatist movements. To say, Catalonia, for one thing, it’s not really very clear what the majority of the population in Catalonia want. I think they’re serious questions about that. The repression of the leaders is certainly, totally unacceptable. Even the people in prison here without charges, gross violation of human rights. The sentencing, I think, was far too severe. But there are issues about separatism, which can’t be just dismissed. Like, for example, in the vote in Canada, just a couple of days ago, a separatist party in Quebec got lots of votes, more strikingly in Western Canada, which is pretty reactionary, deeply involved in a petrol culture. They didn’t win the election, just a majority of the vote. There’s now talk there about what they call separating petro-based Western Canada, rural petro-based Western Canada, from more liberal Eastern Canada. There is talk about that in the United States too, in Europe, in Eurasia, and these questions can’t be just lightly dismissed. They in fact do reflect settlements of significant parts of the population. And when you talk about constitutions, one of the most dramatic examples is, in fact, the United States. Britain has never had a real constitution. The Constitution of 1689 is a couple of sentences, basically affirming the parliamentary sovereignty of the British. What’s called the British Constitution is a collection of norms, conventions and agreements among the elite sectors who ran the country. Boris Johnson’s recent actions are considered scandalous, not because he’s violated the Constitution literally, but because he’s violating the norms and conventions, which is the first time. Technically the United States, of course, has a written constitution. In the context of the 18th century, there were elements of the Constitution that were quite progressive, there’s even a phrase like We the People, you know, which didn’t mean a lot in practice, but just to assert it was revolutionary. It was a very flawed document in other respects, but by the standards of the 18th Century, pretty progressive. The Conserva-

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tives today in the United States are committed to what they call originalism. Originalism is supposed to mean: interpret the Constitution the way the founders thought about it. By today’s standards, that is hopelessly reactionary: to watch the world the way some guys in the 18th century looked at it . . . we know their beliefs at the time. In fact, if the United States were to apply for membership in the European Union, it would be turned down by the European Court of Justice, not to talk about the rest of the parliaments in the European Union. With the Constitution, the worst parts of it can’t even be amended. Because the small, mostly rural based states, pretty conservative, white, Christian, traditional, they have enough votes to block any amendment. So there’s a real constitutional crisis coming where maybe 15% of the population, white, white Supremacist, Christian Evangelical, traditional, could in fact control the Senate, now the main part of Congress. It’s not clear how to get out of that. So adhering literally to a constitution is a very curious document. I mean. Thomas Jefferson was correct when he said, the earth belongs to the living. The Constitution was something that has to be reinterpreted and rewritten for future generations. But I think the same questions arise about your point for a much more recent constitution. But these separatist issues are very tricky ones, especially today, after forty years of general neoliberal assault on the population, which has very harmful effects on the general population almost everywhere, and has led to a deterioration of functioning democracy, that is, wealth gets extremely concentrated, and stagnation everywhere. It’s not a secret that all of this has led to a lot of anger, resentment. In Europe, countries, parties are collapsing, pretty much the same in the United States, even though they keep their names. That is fertile territory for demagogues to rise to try to divert the justified anger from the real sources to escape goats, typically people even more vulnerable than you are: Muslims, immigrants, Afro Americans. Overall it’s a very frightening phenomenon. Prof. Naharro-Calderón: Could we have just one final thought from you? This morning, we remembered one of the successors at Bryn Mawr College of Bertrand Russell. It was one of the exiles, Josep Ferrater Mora, a Spanish and Catalan philosopher. What are we looking

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at for people in the stream of Bertrand Russell and yourself, defenders of peace and dialogue? Prof. Chomsky: Well, I don’t think we should be looking at, you know, people who are well known and published, and so on. We should look at what’s happening on the ground. And what’s happening on the ground is very exciting. Popular movements developing which are extremely impressive, mostly young people. In fact, look at Bernie Sanders. I like him, I think he’s doing very good things. But the most important thing that he did, which broke from the political tradition, is to organize a popular movement. That’s why he’s despised by the elites. So take a look at this morning’s New York Times, for example.2 There’s an article about how Democrats are concerned they may not have the right candidate to defeat Trump in the election. And then they talk about (read the article carefully) why Warren has certain defects, Buttigieg has certain defects, Biden has certain defects. There’s one person who is not mentioned: Sanders. For the NYT he is not a candidate. Literally, even though he’s ahead in the polls: this is standard. And it’s not solely because of his policies, which are not all that different from some others. In fact, they wouldn’t even surprise Eisenhower, to tell you the truth: he is an Old Fashioned New Dealer, not so much about that. But he made a great mistake: he organized a popular movement. That’s dangerous. Once the rebels begin to see that they can do something, you’re in trouble. This goes back to the 17th-ventury English Revolution, I should say, the American Revolution. The leading scholarly study of the Constitution, USA Constitution, is called the Framers’coup. It was the Framers, the way they carried out a coup against the general population, which wanted more democracy, and they were terrified that popular democracy might take over. So they developed a system which would block it in many ways and would assure, as James Madison put it, that the Constitution would respect, would protect the minority of the opulent against

2

Jonathan Martin, “Anxious Democrats Ask, ‘Is There Anybody Else?’” The New York Times, October 23, 2019, p. A 11.

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the majority when People began to recognize their own supremacy. Sanders broke that rule, and that’s why he’s out of the consensus. But it’s happening, and it’s important. Extinction Rebellion [UK], the Sunrise Movement in the United States, popular movements that swept left liberal candidates into office: Ocasio-Cortez and others . . . These are major developments happening in many places. And I think those are real issues. Prof. Uriagereka: Thanks very much.

Noam Chomsky. A conversation with Juan Uriagereka and José María Naharro-Calderón. Keeping Spain’s Exile in the Americas and Maryland: “Alive in our Hearts” (1939-1989-2019), University of Maryland. October 23, 2019. Prof. Naharro-Calderón: Thank you. Prof Chomsky: Thank you. Prof. Uriagereka: Take care of yourself.

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The Contributors

M.ª de la Luz Bort Caballero is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Huelva. She received her PhD in Spanish Language and Literature in 2019 from UMD. Her research focuses on 20th century literature and cultural studies, Spanish women writers, and Spanish Republican exile. She has also taught at Harvard University and Universidad Isabel I in Burgos. She has published reviews, articles, and book chapters and participated in more than twenty international conferences and seminars. She is the coordinator of the Palau de Nemes’s Archive in the Centro de Estudios Juanramonianos, treasurer of the Asociación para el Estudio de los Exilios y Migraciones Ibéricos Contemporáneos [AEMIC], and member of the Instituto de Estudios Medievales y Renacentistas y de Humanidades Digitales [IEMYRhd]. Zoraida Carandell is Professor of Contemporary Spanish Literature at the University of Paris Nanterre, head of LIRE19-21 group, president of CERMI and a board member of AEMIC. Her research focuses on the poetry and theater of the Silver Age and the Spanish Republican exile. She has recently published Le soleil noir du sens. L’oxymore dans la poésie espagnole de l’âge d’argent (Peter Lang, 2020) and Lecture de Poeta en Nueva York. García Lorca ou la déréliction lyrique (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2020).

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Noam Chomsky. Institute Professor Emeritus, MIT and Laureate Professor University of Arizona. Author, activist. Nélida Devesa-Gómez (PhD UMD [Exiles and Networks in the USA Hispanism (1961-2011): Fictions and Non-Fictions of Migrancy]) is a Lecturer of Contemporary Spanish Literature and Culture at Howard University. She received a BA in Journalism and Comparative Literature at Universidad Complutense (2010, Madrid) and an MA in Hispanic Literatures and Cultures at the Catholic University of America (2016). She has been the recipient of a Fullbright Fellowship (2010-11), the 2020 UMD Graduate School Summer Research Scholarship, and the UMD Mary Savage Snouffer Fellowship (202122). At UMD, she directed the Salamanca-Barcelona Summer Program (2019). She has presented several papers on film and literature at international conferences, published several reviews in Migraciones y exilios, and is affiliated with AEMIC. Andreu Espasa is affiliated with the Institute of Historical Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico since 2015. He holds a PhD in Comparative, Political and Social History from the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona and has authored Estados Unidos en la Guerra Civil Española [The United States in the Spanish Civil War] (Libros de la Catarata, 2017) and Historia del New Deal. Conflicto y reforma durante la Gran Depresión [History of the New Deal. Conflict and Reform of during the Great Depression] (Libros de la Catarata, 2020). Montse Feu is an Associate Professor at Sam Houston State University, where she teaches Spanish and Hispanic Cultures. She is a recovery scholar with the goal to preserve, examine, and make available antifascist, worker, and USA Hispanic periodicals and migration and exile literature at large. Her research builds on the knowledge generated by the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage (RUSHLH), the Research Society for American Periodicals (RSAP), and by networks of radical and exile studies. She is a board member for the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, for the Re-

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search Society for American Periodicals, for the International Editorial Advisory Board, Manchester University Press Contemporary Anarchist Studies Book Series, and AEMIC. She is a first-generation scholar, raised by workers. Víctor Fuentes, born in Madrid, left Spain in 1954 and received his doctorate from NYU in 1965. He is a Professor, now emeritus, at the University of California Santa Barbara. Among his extensive list of publications: La marcha al pueblo en las letras españolas 19171936 (Ediciones de la Torre, 1980), and other books on Galdós, César Vallejo, Benjamín Jarnés, Antonio Machado and Buñuel. He is also the author of critical editions of La Regenta, Misericordia, an Anthology of Spanish Bohemian Poetry and Spanish Bohemian Tales. He is a permanent member of the North American Academy of the Spanish Language and a corresponding member of the Royal Spanish Academy. Anne Giller-Wilde is a Lecturer at Catholic University. She completed her PhD in Spanish Language and Literature at UMD and her MA in Hispanic Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her interests reside in the Realist and Naturalist novel of the 19th century, in particular Galdós, Pardo Bazán and Blasco Ibáñez, the Spanish post-war novel, the contemporary Spanish narrative and the relationship between stock market tendencies and literary production. María Gómez-Martín is an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Translation Studies at California State University San Marcos. She holds a PhD in Spanish Language, Literature, and Culture from UMD. Dr. Gómez-Martín also holds a BA and MA in Translation and Interpreting from the Universidad de Valladolid (Spain), and two MAs from West Virginia University (Morgantown, WV), one in Hispanic Literature and the other in Education. She is affiliated with AEMIC. Iker González-Allende is Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He specializes in 20th-21st century Spain, masculinities, gender and queer studies, exile and migration,

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Basque studies, the Spanish Civil War, and autobiographical writing. In addition to more than 50 articles in volumes and academic journals, he has published seven books, such as Hombres en movimiento: masculinidades españolas en los exilios y emigraciones, 1939-1999 (Purdue University Press, 2018) and Líneas de fuego: género y nación en la narrativa española durante la Guerra Civil (1936-1939) (Biblioteca Nueva, 2011). Rachel Linville (PhD UMD) is an Associate Professor of Spanish at SUNY-Brockport. Her book La memoria de los maquis: miradas sobre la guerrilla antifranquista (Anthropos, 2014) analyzes how the collective, traumatic, and historical memory of the antifascist resistance movement that opposed Francisco Franco’s regime has evolved, by classifying nearly 200 literary and filmic representations of the movement into five periods that extend from 1936 to 2010. Steven Mansbach, distinguished university professor and professor of the history of 20th-century Art (UMD), focuses his research and teaching interests on the genesis and reception of “classical” modern art, roughly from the last quarter of the 19th century through to the middle of the 20th. With interests that encompass all of Europe, his specific area of scholarly publication is the art of Central and Eastern Europe from the Baltic north to the Adriatic south. Carlos José Martínez Fernández is a PhD in Musicology (University of Oviedo), MA in Orchestral Conducting (RSM London) and Senior Professor of Recorder (Salamanca). He is a specialist in heritage music and historical interpretation. He is the resident of the Sociedad Torner for the recovery of musical assets, and a recipient of numerous awards as a composer. He has released his entire catalog in Opera, Lied, Chamber Music, Choral and Symphonic Music. He is a board member of AEMIC. José María Naharro-Calderón is Professor of Spanish Literature, Iberian Cultures and Exile Studies at the University of Maryland. He has attempted to map the itineraries of some voices from the Spanish

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1939 exiles and their relevance for bridging the gaps and omissions in Spain’s contemporary cultural landscapes: Celso Amieva, Max Aub, María Luisa Elío, Juan Ramón Jiménez, concentration camp witnesses . . . He pioneered the symposium El exilio de las Españas de 1939 en las Américas: ¿adónde fue la canción? (1989-91). He is the president of AEMIC (2016-2024), and since 2002, he has coordinated the Summer Seminar in Llanes (Asturias): Diásporas y Fronteras [Diasporas and Borders]. Anaïs Naharro-Murphy is a singer, opera maker, and teacher currently based in Spain. Anaïs focuses her own practice as well as her students’ on finding our “voice” and passions through music and creativity while shedding the institutional, systemic, and social layers that keep opera and classical music away from its true source: the people! Whether it is through her work as an opera maker with ENAensemble (@ena_ensemble or enaensemble.org), with students and teachers in the classroom, or as part of the artistic process as a singer herself, Anaïs approaches this work with compassion, collaboration, care, and context. As an avid proponent of music in contemporary culture, Anaïs focuses on premiering and creating new works, making music inventive, interactive, and interesting, reviving unknown works, or performing works that have been “re-discovered.” Kathryn Taylor holds a PhD in Spanish literature from UMD (2017). Her research focuses on Contemporary Peninsular Literature, with an emphasis on exile, women writers, and intellectual history. She has presented conference papers and published studies on María Teresa León and Jomí García Ascot. Currently, she is a lecturer of Spanish at Towson University, where she has taught since 2012, and is affiliated with AEMIC. Francesc Torres is a versatile Catalan artist, based in Barcelona and Jersey City (USA), and best known for being a pioneer in the language of video and multimedia installations. He has been a curator of numerous exhibits and essayist in many publications and newspapers. His last exhibit (MNAC [National Art Museum of Catalonia, 2021]) is entitled: Interior Aeronautics [Flight].

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Juan Uriagereka is a Professor at the Department of Linguistics and the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, and its former Director (UMD). His research focuses on biolinguistics, syntax and social justice. His central course in SLLC is “Mythology of the Oppressed,” which examines universality in human myths. Since joining the university in 1989, he has published a dozen books as well as many articles and chapters. As the former Associate Provost for faculty affairs at UMD, he spearheaded family-friendly policies, regularized the status of professional-track faculty, organized leadership forums and updated appointment, promotion and tenure policies. His current works in progress include “Structure,” a multidisciplinary project to formulate language structures as linear operators and a book on code-switching. He earned his doctorate in Linguistics from the University of Connecticut. Pierre Verdaguer is Professor Emeritus (UMD), where he specialized in 20th century fiction, French cultural studies, and the history of ideas. His publications have focused on novelists and thinkers of the inter-war period such as Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Denis de Rougemont, and Henri Bosco, but also on detective fiction, popular heroes, the use of stereotypes, and the representation of France and the French in American films. Ricardo F. Vivancos-Pérez is Associate Professor at George Mason University and specializes in the cultural production of Hispanics and Latinxs in the United States. He is lead editor of the critical edition of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands / La Frontera (2021), author of Radical Chicana Poetics (2013), and editor of the special dossier “Pedro Salinas en los Estados Unidos: aproximaciones interdisciplinares a un intelectual poliédrico en el exilio” (BANLE, 2020).

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Keeping Spain’s Exiles in the Americas and Maryland: “Alive in our Hearts” (1939-1989-2019). University of Maryland. October 24, 2019.

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