Presentation: «Migraciones & Exilios, 20» y «Spain’s 1939 Exiles in the Americas and Maryland»

José María Naharro Calderón presents his edited volume on Spanish exiles in the Americas

Presentation in Madrid at the Instituto Cervantes Headquarters on June 16, 2022, among other publications, of "Spain’s 1939 Exiles in the Americas and Maryland. Eighty Years, Alive in our Hearts", during the 25th Anniversary of la Asociación para el Estudio de las Migraciones y Exilios  Ibéricos Contemporáneos (AEMIC.ORG), presided by Prof. José María Naharro-Calderón.   “Spain’s 1939 Exiles in the Americas and Maryland. Eighty Years, Alive in our Hearts” (Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2022) is a volume on  the Symposium held at UMD, on October 23-24, 2019, with the participation of several SPAP PhDs and other witnesses from the post 1939 Exile era in the Americas, such as Noam Chomsky or Víctor Fuentes.

The Association for the Study of Contemporary Iberian Exiles and Migrations (AEMIC) seeks to contribute to the study, dissemination and understanding of multiple aspects of contemporary Iberian migrations, with extensions to other areas of forced displacement.

Exile, a global and protean phenomenon, touched about half million Spanish Republican refugees at the end of the 1936-39 War in Spain. Contrary to Mexico’s significant sheltering, the USA mainly admitted a select group of intellectuals: notably, Zenobia Camprubí and her partner, the 1956 Nobel Prize for Literature recipient, Juan Ramón Jiménez, University of Maryland (1943-1951), Pedro Salinas (Johns Hopkins Univ.), or women like Carmen Aldecoa, or Carmen de Zulueta, who kept alive the progressive gender and education claims from the Second Spanish Republic (1931-1939) at other schools and universities.

Nevertheless, widely supported relief organizations and leftist publications channeled aid for the exiles, and rose antifascist awareness for US intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky. Contributions herein this volume, generated eighty years later at the University of Maryland during an international symposium (2019), throughout a continuing academic interest for this diaspora, will illuminate readers on the depth of Spanish exile studies in the Americas, and some lasting contributions from this significant group of witnesses.