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Fighting Fascist Spain: Worker Protest from the Printing PressWriting Revolution: Hispanic Anarchism in the United States

2021; Duke University Press; Volume: 18; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/15476715-9361527

1558-1454

David Struthers,

Italian Fascism and Post-war Society

In the past twenty years, scholarly interest in anarchism has flourished across the social sciences and especially history. The new histories of anarchism examined the community foundations of movements and often the facilitating role of the press. In doing so, this literature pushed transnational labor and immigration history forward by giving us nuanced understandings of how people became anarchists, how anarchist ideals spread around the world, explanations of why the classical period of anarchism came to an end around World War II, and how these ideals were carried forward to feed new movements as the century wore on.This literature is inherently transnational and the most developed strands of these new studies consolidate around ethnicity and language. So, for example, we have significant new contributions to the literature on Italian anarchists in Italy and throughout the Americas that built on prior migration studies, such as those by Donna Gabaccia. Kenyon Zimmer examined Jewish anarchism through a transnational immigration frame and through the use of Yiddish. Similar developments occurred among scholars of Latin America and the Caribbean. Spanish-language anarchism proved a remarkably functional vessel that spanned geographic distance and national distinction across three continents. Writing Revolution, edited by Christopher J. Castañeda and Montse Feu, and Feu's monograph Fighting Fascist Spain, fill a gap in this literature with their focus on Spain. Both of the works under review reinforce the central place print culture holds in our understanding of how transnational anarchist communities formed and functioned despite difficult circumstances.The editors of Writing Revolution, who also contributed chapters, choose the term Hispanic, not to exclude other current or historical terms, but to cast a wide net of inclusion of “linguistic and cultural identities in Latin America, Spain, and the United States” (12). The chapters follow in their use of the term through their deep analysis of national contexts and international solidarities. The choice of terms supports the volume's ability to explore “the ways in which many migrant and politically conscious Hispanic anarchists who shared language, cultural history, and a commitment to social justice influenced the historical and cultural evolution of the United States” (3).The volume pursues this aim along three themes that supported the anarchist movement and gave it strength and breadth: (1) border-crossing Spanish-language and Hispanic culture; (2) transnational anarchist print culture; and (3) the mobility of organizers. The volume's fifteen chapters are divided into five thematic sections that focus on the 1880s to the 1930s, with a few chapters that extend the time frame into the 1970s. One biographical chapter by David Watson only reaches its end with the death of the Spanish exile Federico Arcos in 2015. With such geographic and temporal breadth, the book is a rich tapestry of historical experience and radical possibility.Without the space to engage with all the consistently high-quality chapters, this review will focus on the contributions of early career scholars providing fresh perspectives. María José Domínguez and Antonio Herrería Fernández turn their attention to La Revista Blanca, an anarchist publication in Spain that connected itself to the Americas through translation and news exchanges, most notably with Cultura Proletaria, a Spanish-language anarchist newspaper published in the United States. The authors document the layers of a transnational anarchist community, from the circulation of print media to individuals like Pedro Esteve who wrote, edited, and organized, and, finally, to the close-knit communities formed by individuals and families who made anarchism part of their daily lives. These themes are visible throughout the volume.Michel Otayek's chapter, “Keepsakes of the Revolution,” examines the Foreign Propaganda Office of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) and Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI) during the Spanish Civil War. Otayek documents the failures of Augustin Souchy, who as head of the office focused organizing efforts toward French and Swedish anarchists and neglected the anarchist movement in the United States and across the Americas. The disjointed anarchist solidarity movement was dwarfed by that of socialists and communists. The 1930s were a critical time for anarchist movements in the United States. Facing the Great Depression, communists and socialists largely supported the New Deal, which left anarchists isolated on the left. Demographic change also raised questions of whether movements should turn to English in their organizing. Situated in this context, Otayek notes that the most successful Spanish-language anarchist solidarity in North America came independently from Hispanic anarchists in the United States and Canada.The volume's use of the term Hispanic as a broad signifier notwithstanding, nearly all of the chapters examine Spanish immigrants or exiles or look to connections between the Americas and Spain. This increases its contribution, rather than being an omission. There is a well-developed literature on Latin American anarchism in addition to Mexican anarchism before, during, and after the Mexican Revolution and its many cross-border connections. The Partido Liberal Mexicana (PLM), with a leadership mostly based in Los Angeles, was the center of a global solidarity network. Christopher J. Castañeda's contribution explores the Spanish immigrant anarchist Jaime Vidal's connection to the constellation of Mexican radicalism in this period. This chapter adds to our knowledge of revolutionary networks that Kirwin Shaffer, who also contributed to the present volume, has documented throughout his publications. These channels had nodes in Los Angeles, Mexico, the Caribbean, New York, and Florida that then reached down through to South America and then to Spain. Until now, though, the connections to Spanish anarchists have been underdeveloped.Another commendable aspect of this volume is the impressive number of scholars from outside the United States. Too often, transnationality is taken as a topic of historical inquiry, but not in broadening scholarly networks.Monste Feu's monograph Fighting Fascist Spain is split into two parts: the first titled “Print Culture, Activism, and Solidarity”; and the second titled “Literary Representations and Aesthetics.” The book focuses on the “major collective grassroots political project” (2) of España Libre, published by the Sociedades Hispanas Confederadas between 1939 and 1977. An important feature of this project was the dispersed community of solidarity that cooperated across distance for a common goal, a condition also documented throughout Writing Revolution and other new anarchist histories. Many contributors to España Libre lived in countries apart from the United States and Spain, and “their works preserved the cultural history of progressive and radical Spain” (46). Dispersed community was a feature of exile, and Feu draws out the idea of exile as a present condition and a historical construction to enrich our understanding of the underresearched post–World War II period of anarchist history. Feu argues for the importance of España Libre in this history. España Libre, “as an exile periodical, was the most important connecting point for members of the organization, providing a bridge across ideological differences. It facilitated extraordinary solidarity, which in turn fostered deep interpersonal social ties” (174).After defeat in Spain and facing conservative retrenchment in the United States following World War II, “anarchists no longer sought violent insurrection against the state but instead sought spontaneous prefiguration of a free society enacted by everyday acts of mass organizing, cooperation, and cultural transformation. Instead of eliminating the idea of revolution, exiles integrated their revolutionary principles into everyday life in the United States” (19). This transition was also reflected in the political environment, which constrained the range of permissible political discourse in the United States in this period. These constraints manifest in differences between Giménez Igualada's writings published in the United States and Mexico. Feu argued that Igualada's works, “published in Mexico and away from the scrutiny of the FBI and the Francoist diplomacy in the United States, advocated for anarchist thought and practice, contested propaganda against the movement, and documented his refugee experience” (118). By contrast, his writings published in the United States formulated a “maternal approach” (118); indeed, central to Feu's analysis is an interrogation of España Libre's “patriarchal culture” (78).In the United States, anarchists directed the majority of their organizing energy toward preventing deportations back to Spain and supporting political prisoners languishing in Franco's cages. Confederadas members organized a letter-writing campaign to mainstream media in an attempt to shape public debate. Feu notes that movement-produced periodicals nurtured an existing community and represented an important development of activist media in the United States. The cultural forms that supported anarchist organizing and their community included theater, satire, and cartoons, to which Feu devotes a chapter each. One such cultural form was “a countercultural resistance to fascist myths . . . based on an inquisitive playfulness as well as a joyous and affective engagement with others, setting España Libre readers free from fascist ideas of society” (169).Both books would be worthy contributions to courses on immigration, transnationalism, radicalism, and media. It would be particularly easy to assign selected chapters from Writing Revolution in undergraduate classes. With the valuable contributions of these works and the growth of new histories of anarchism, it is time for someone to take on the task of incorporating this scholarship into a synthetic account of anarchist movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It would force reevaluations of transnational community and solidarity.