Department of World Languages & Cultures

The Struggle for Libertad
Hispanic Anarcho-Syndicalists and their Transnational Networks
(draft title)

The diverse Hispanic population in the United States evolved from the Spanish territories once annexed to it as well as subsequent migrations from Spanish-speaking countries. While Hispanic culture has deeply influenced the U.S. in many ways, this relationship cannot be fully understood without an exploration into the lesser known influences: political conflicts, labor struggles, and intellectual dialogue from and to Spanish speaking communities and countries.

We refer specifically to Hispanic anarcho-syndicalists to privilege a linguistic and cultural interpretation of identity; we contend that Hispanic heritage and Spanish language has uniquely marked the experience of Hispanic anarchists in the United States. Either by crossing frontiers or crossing national or regional borders, Hispanic anarchists knowingly left behind support systems in the Spanish-speaking world and in turn constructed new communities if not personal identities. Our methodological approach investigates the multidirectional connections between societies and nations with special emphasis on interaction and mutual dependencies.

This edited volume of essays is meant to bring together scholars from various disciplines and perspectives working on different geographic, national, cultural, artistic, and ideological components of Hispanic anarchism in the United States. The volume intends to explore Hispanic anarcho-syndicalists’ theoretical and cultural production, solidarities, and their lived practice in the late nineteenth through twentieth century.

We expect the volume to be divided generally into four chronological/thematic sections:
           
            I.          1850-1900 (Unrest in Spain, Migration, Emerging Nations)
            II.        1900-1930 (Labor, Regional Movements, Leading Figures, Press, Latin America)
            III.      1930-1960 (Anarcho-Syndicalism, Anti-Fascism, Spanish Civil War, Exile)
            IV.      1960-2015 (Toward Occupy, Politics of Gender, Language and Identity)

Topics of engagement include, but are not limited to:

-    Labor struggles and conflict; repression and resistance.
-    Migration and exile, both state-centric and transnational approaches.
-    Recovery of texts, actors, groups, mutualities, Ateneos, everyday life and practice.
-  Solidarities and networks.
-  Interaction of identity construction, gender roles, memory and social tradition.
-    Participation on international struggles, exile and migration, ideas in movement.
-    Methodological and/or historiographical approaches.
-    Contributions to fields of art, science, and education.
-    Print culture/ publishing, aesthetics, theatre, and literature.
-    Challenges to western-centrism and patriarchy.

PROSPECTIVE AUTHORS

​Please send abstracts up to 500 words for proposed chapters. Email abstracts that include proposed chapter title and a short CV to both editors, Montse Feu (mmf017@shsu.edu) and Chris Castañeda (cjc@csus.edu) ASAP or by April 1, 2016. After acceptance by the co-editors, completed papers (6000 to 8000 words) along with all illustrations and figures (including any required permissions) should be completed and sent to the co-editors by December 31, 2016. After acceptance of proposed chapters, we will finalize an advance contract with a university press (TBA). Any questions should be addressed to both the aforementioned email addresses.

Co-Editors

Montse Feu (Maria Montserrat Feu López) is assistant professor in Spanish at Sam Houston State University. Her research focuses on U.S. Spanish-language newspapers and the Spanish Civil War exile print culture in the United States. Her articles and reviews have appeared in Camino Real, fronteraD, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Interdisciplinary Humanities, Letras Femeninas, Migraciones & Exilios Cuadernos AEMIC, Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, and Studies in American Humor. Her book, Correspondencia personal y política de un anarcosindicalista exiliado: Jesús González Malo (1950-1965) (Santander: Colección Cuatro Estaciones. Universidad de Cantabria, 2016), examines the correspondence of Jesús González Malo, Spanish Civil War exile anarcho-syndicalist and editor of the newspaper España Libre (NYC, 1939-1977).​

Christopher J. Castañeda is professor of History at California State University, Sacramento. He has a book chapter forthcoming: “'Yours for the revolution': Cigar Makers, Anarchists and Brooklyn’s Spanish Colony, 1878-1925" in Hidden Out in the Open: Spanish Migration to the United States (1875-1930), co-edited by Phylis Cancilla Martinelli and Ana Varela-Lago. He will present his research at the Latin American Studies Association (New York, 2016) and has given presentations on Spanish immigrant cigar-makers and their anarchist press at the Business History Conference (Miami, 2015) and the Southwest Anthropology Association (Long Beach, 2015). He recently co-edited the book, River City and Valley Life: An Environmental History of the Sacramento Region (Pittsburgh, 2013).

In the dark year of 1939, having fought for the anarchist CNT-FAI in Spain, Félix Martí Ibáñez (1911-1972) – physician, sexologist, novelist – went into exile in the United States. What might have become a classic case of the Fitzgeraldian rule that there are No Second Acts In American Life in fact presents an astonishing case of self-reinvention: in the Forties and Fifties, Martí Ibáñez the exile emerges as a prolific, entrepreneurial writer-salesman, a popularizer of science and impresario of medicine with a literary sideline. But this glamorous public persona concealed two realities: his continuing engagement with the Spanish anarchist cause (speaking against the Franco dictatorship and writing for España Libre and Solidaridad Obrera), and his growing involvement in pay-to-play promotions for the pharmaceutical industry – an increasingly shady business that would result in his being summoned before a Congressional inquest in 1960. How to understand the coexistence of these disparate and conflicting identities – the scientist and man of letters, the loyal militant in exile, and the self-interested huckster? Which was the true, the underlying reality, and which a disguise? Can all of them have been “true”? Or might all have been “false”? How might these questions of identity have been complicated by a shifting political landscape, as the U.S., a potential ally in the anti-fascist cause, came to embrace Franco as an ally against Communism?