Upon taking over the state of Navarra in 1936, Nationalist General Emilio Mola declared a war of extermination against their opposition (Preston 179). By the Spring of 1937, Nationalist forces, with the aid of German and Italian air force volunteers, expanded the campaign, bombarding Republican territories such as Guernica, Barcelona, Valencia, and Durango. As the threats intensified and the Nationalists’ forces claimed more of the Northern front, Republican authorities and supporters became increasingly focused on protecting their children from the violence.

To that end, the flailing Republican government initiated a free program to send children away from the war zone. The program’s requirements were minimal. Children were to be between the ages of 3 and 15, have a valid health certificate, and provide a parental consent form. With the support of the Mexican organization the Comité de Ayuda a los Niños del Pueblo Español and a formal invitation from the Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas, the Republicans enrolled a total of 456 children in the program (Pla Brugat 13). Of the 456 children, the majority came from regions controlled by the Republicans such as Valencia and Barcelona, although substantial numbers also came from major battle fronts like Madrid, Málaga, and Galicia as well (Payá Valera 261–75).

In May of 1937, the nearly five hundred children, along with 12 teachers, 3 nurses, and a doctor boarded the ship Mexique and began their life-changing, transatlantic journey. Fourteen days later, the group arrived at the Mexican port city of Veracruz. From Veracruz, the children travelled by train to Morelia, a small city in the western state of Michoacán. From this point forward, the children would be collectively known as the niños de Morelia, a term of endearment that reflected the city where they spent their first years in Mexico.

Below I have created two maps that show the origins and the journey to exile of the niños de Morelia.

Origins of the niños de Morelia

I created this map using ArcGIS. First, I created a spreadsheet with the children's names, their hometowns, and the geographic coordinates of the town. I then sorted the mapping results to create hotspots based on the number of children from each town.

Journey to Exile

I created the Journey to Exile map in Google Maps. I selected the points along their journey and annotated each point with the date of departure/arrival and additional details.

Background

Born in Barcelona in 1930, Payá Valera lived in an ordinary working-class neighborhood with his family until the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. At the age of seven, his parents made the decision to send him and his siblings to Mexico through the Comité de Ayuda a los Niños del Pueblo Español program. Over the course of thirty-five chapters, his memoir Los niños españoles de Morelia recalls the circumstances of their departure from Spain, the conditions of their schools, their free time activities, their reunion with their parents years later, and his return to Spain after the death of Franco. Based on his memories and the recollections of his former classmates, Payá Valera’s text relates the children’s understanding of his parents’ choices during the Civil War, their interpretation of their surroundings in Mexico, and their perception of the consequences of exile on long-term, familial relationships.

In recording the events of his life, I suggest that Payá Valera adopts a variety of parabolic narrative structures and styles to relate the details of his life and the moral lesson that may be gleaned from his change in fortune.

Sentiment Analysis

This data-driven analysis is largely based on the work of digital humanist Matthew Jockers. Jockers’ research focuses on the relationship between textual sentiment and plot shape. In Jockers’ theoretical writings, his uses computational analysis to generate data in support of his assertion regarding the existence of broad literary plot patterns. Most of his research is conducted using the statistical computing program, R Studio. In 2015, he wrote an R Studio programming package “to extract sentiment and plot information from prose”(2). Known as Syuzhet, the package, "…attempts to reveal the latent structure of narrative by means of sentiment analysis. Instead of detecting shifts in the topic or subject matter of the narrative, the Syuzhet package reveals the emotional shifts that serve as proxies for the narrative movement between conflict and conflict resolution" (Jockers, “Syuzhet”).

Methodology

For this analysis, I first scanned the text of Los niños de Morelia: El exilio infantil en México by Emeterio Payá Valera. After scanning the book, I used ocular character recognition software to convert the scanned images into a text file. I uploaded the text file to R Studio and applied the sentiment-analysis package Syuzhet.

The graph for Los Niños Españoles de Morelia (below-right), shows the progression of the emotional valence of the text as the memoir progresses from beginning to end. At the beginning of the graph, we see how the text’s protagonists suffer a rapid fall in their fortune and then experience a sustained period of distress (figure 1). The rise at the end of the graph demonstrates how, as Payá Valera’s story comes to a close, the protagonists experience a significant improvement in their life circumstances.

Analysis

Using a combination of R Studio text analytics and close reading, I have categorized Payá Valera’s text as following a man-in-hole, parabola-shaped plot (see below). The man-in-hole shape, as Jockers explains it, “is often about a hero and a bad guy where there is some threat to a person or a culture that must be eliminated…the main character is forced to take it on and then change his or her fortunes back to good” (104).

Beyond simply mirroring the parable plot shape, I suggest that the man-in-hole shape reinforces the children’s transatlantic attachments and represents a manifestation of the broader, hispanismo narrative. In studying autobiographical memory, Dan P. McAdams observes that authors’ subjective perspectives provide the details of their mental states and their experiences, while a societal master narrative provides the frame for how their lives are represented and evaluated (95–116). When these memories are committed to the page, Ángel Loureiro writes, that autobiography is “an act that is at once discursive, intertextual, rhetorical, ethical, and political” (4). It follows that, although memoirs are recollections of personal experiences, the memories recalled are not exclusively individual in nature. As Robyn Fivush notes, “autobiographical memory is memory beyond the individual to include how an individual life is understood, modulated, and transformed through socially and culturally constructed narratives” (226). Viewed through this lens, we see how Payá Valera’s memoirs are undergirded by how the children internalized and reproduced narrative structures and how the niños inscribed a set of ideological moral values to their life stories. By combining text analysis and close reading, I suggest that we may discover the avatars of the Republican’s utopian belief system, manifested in the parabolic narrative shape.