The Parábolas of Spanish Civil War Exiles in Mexico

The Parables and Parabolas of Spanish Civil War Exiles

The Parables and Parabolas of Spanish Civil War Exiles is an online collection that aims to share scholarly and pedagogical resources related to the exiled community including architectural, documentary, artistic, geographic, and bibliographic materials. With the support of Vanderbilt's Center for Digital Humanities and a Mellon fellowship for Digital Humanities, this site provides a public-facing environment for materials from in and around Mexico City and Cuernavaca. The objective of this project is to share materials with researchers, students, teachers and those interested in learning about Spanish Civil War exiles.

Below you will find links to each gallery in the collection. Information about the theoretical framework and bibliographic references for this collection are also included.

Historical Background:

After the fall of the Spanish Republic in 1939, artists, writers, academics, and members of the Republican government left Spain and went into exile. Many members of this community first sought refuge in France, living in crowded, under-resourced concentration camps. The Nazi occupation of France, however, forced the exiled Republicans to once again disperse, and many departed to safer places such as Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Colombia, Argentina, and Venezuela.

Rather than a homogeneous group, the exiles were diverse both in region of origin and age. In 1937, the first lady of México coordinated the arrival of the niños de Morelia, a group of nearly five hundred Spanish orphans and children whose parents sought a safer environment. On the heels of the successful settlement of the niños de Morelia, Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas announced that Mexico would welcome all of the refugees that the Spanish Republic could transport (Faber, Exile and Cultural Hegemony16). Upon his announcement, nearly thirty thousand Spanish exiles settled in Mexico.

Like individual Republicans, the Republican seat of government first relocated to France, and then moved to Mexico following the occupation of France. As part of this movement, both the offices of President and Prime Minister continued to operate in exile. Although their forces had been unsuccessful in defeating Franco during the Spanish Civil War, the Republicans remained hopeful that the Allied Forces would depose the regime and that the Republican government would resume governing.

To aid the exiles during this interim period, the Republican government established organizations such as the Servicio de Evacuación de Refugiados Españoles (SERE) and the Junta de Auxilio a los Republicanos Españoles (JARE). With the support of SERE and JARE, approximately 20,000 exiles evacuated France, with 7,000 of those exiles making their way to Mexico (Fagen 37). Once in Mexico, these exiles received job placement, housing, and financial assistance.

According to the initial agreement between the aid organizations and the Mexican government, the majority of these exiles were meant to work in agriculture in rural areas such as Puebla and Huasteca. The arrangement further specified that only a limited number of Republican intellectuals and elites would be permitted to reside in Mexico City (54–56). Despite this understanding, the exiles flooded Mexico City and the number of intellectuals far exceeded expectations. The earliest group of intellectuals to relocate to Mexico had arrived at the invitation of the Mexican government before the war’s conclusion. A fairly small cohort, these intellectuals tended to be older and politically moderate. In contrast, the much larger cohort of intellectuals that reached Mexico after the war was younger and more politically active.

Regardless of age, affiliation, and arrival date, the intellectuals living in Mexico took their roles as the bearers of Spain’s culture seriously. As the Junta de Cultura Españolaexplained, it was a task that required a transatlantic synthesis for they were, “aquellos españoles en los que concurra la doble calidad: de estar desterrados y de ser creadores o mantenedores de la cultura española” (Art VI Junta de CulturaRegulations). A somewhat paradoxical effort, these exiles faced the challenge of how to advocate for and maintain a specific set of political and cultural aims for a nation in which they no longer lived while also adjusting to their lives in an unfamiliar country.

While studies have surveyed the literary and cultural contributions of the exile community in Mexico, research has yet to turn a critical eye toward the role of the interrelated dynamics of narrative, public space and the exiles’ ideology. Taking as a point of departure the Junta’s description of the exile condition, this study signals the importance of acts of creation for finding common ground for a diverse group of desterrados and the broader transatlantic community. Although the civil war exiles shared a common language with their hosts, I suggest that it was the power of story brought these sides together. In the polyphony of political ideologies, stories provide a frame for what it means to belong across geographic and national borders. Narratives not only explain a set of values, they also allow for these values to be shared through retelling. With this study, I highlight how various exiled creators used the parábola to exemplify and disseminate their hispanismo worldview. This study considers instances of the parabolic construction of hispanismo in the arched buildings of the exiled Spanish architect Félix Candela, the visual art of the “La Hispanidad” mural of Josep Renau, the print culture found in the exile magazine España Peregrina, and the narrative of niño de Morelia,Emeterio Payá Valerio.

Hispanismo vs. Hispanidad

Hispanidad, an ideology promoted by the Franco regime, promoted a vision of society grounded in unity, order, and religion. As regime supporter Ramiro de Maeztu wrote in his 1934 text Defensa de la hispanidad, the future of the Spanish nation depended on its conformity to the two principal tenets of hispanidad: celebrating the Catholic religious order of the 15^th century and rejecting Enlightenment appeals to reason (Maeztu 186). Franco’s hispanidad ideology entailed, “… a return of the whole Hispanic world to the Hispanic tradition and ideals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which means largely getting rid of the liberal, masonic, democratic, and Communistic ideas” (Bristol 313).

Whereas hispanidad was conceived of as a return to pre-1800 times, the Republic hispanismo advocated for social advancement. In response to Maeztu’s religious conceptualization of hispanidad, Republican writer Ramón Xirau explicitly rejected the Catholic foundations of Spanish culture and history. Xirau explained that hispanismo aimed to supplant hispanidad’s antiquated religious and social hierarchies with universal suffrage, social justice, and democratic rights (Krauel 215).

These distinct understandings of the proper form for Spanish society were reflected in fundamental differences in their approaches to governance. Hispanismo’s horizontalist preference for transnational collaboration was an extension of a broader Republican inclination for democratic input and participation. Based on a parliamentary system, the Second Republic had held competitive, democratic elections and had extended political and civil rights, introduced public education, and granted suffrage to women. On the other end of the spectrum, the verticality of hispanidad’s conceptualization mirrored the configuration of their domestic institutions. Once in power, Francisco Franco imposed sweeping, centralized authority. He consolidated existing political parties and ideologies into a partido único known as the Falange Española Tradicionalista (FET). Within this apparatus, Franco became the “archetype of the Spanish fatherland” and the “savior of Western civilization” (Payne and Palacios 171).

In addition to a vision for Spanish society, both ideologies held a desire to spread Spanish morality throughout the world. Despite their shared concern with morality, Spain's relationship with other countries took radically different forms under the two ideologies. As exiled professor Francisco Carmona Nenclares explains, hispanismo envisioned Spain working alongside Ibero-American countries in order to aid them in reaching the highest point in their own histories. Alternatively, hispanidad advocated for a return to the paternal relationship between Ibero-America and Spain (Krauel 213).