Writing Revolution

Hispanic Anarchism in the United States

Christopher J. Castañeda, Montse Feu, Christopher J. Castañeda, Montse Feu

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780252051609
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

In the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries, the anarchist effort to promote free thought, individual liberty, and social equality relied upon an international Spanish-language print network. These channels for journalism and literature promoted anarchist ideas and practices while fostering transnational solidarity and activism from Buenos Aires to Los Angeles to Barcelona. Christopher J. Castañeda and Montse Feu edit a collection that examines many facets of Spanish-language anarchist history. Arranged chronologically and thematically, the essays investigate anarchist print culture's transatlantic origins; Latina/o labor-oriented anarchism in the United States; the anarchist print presence in locales like Mexico's borderlands and Steubenville, Ohio; the history of essential publications and the individuals behind them; and the circulation of anarchist writing from the Spanish-American War to the twenty-first century.Contributors: Jon Bekken, Christopher Castañeda, Jesse Cohn, Sergio Sánchez Collantes, María José Domínguez, Antonio Herrería Fernández, Montse Feu, Sonia Hernández, Jorell A. Meléndez-Badillo, Javier Navarro Navarro, Michel Otayek, Mario Martín Revellado, Susana Sueiro Seoane, Kirwin R. Shaffer, Alejandro de la Torre, and David Watson

PART I

Transatlantic Origins

CHAPTER 1

Spanish Republicanism and the Press

The Political Socialization of Anarchists
in the United States (1880s–1910s)

SERGIO SÁNCHEZ COLLANTES

It is well known that the press played a fundamental role in the politicization of anarchist workers across the United States, but the fact that anarchist papers specifically were not the only means to do this is less well known. Freethinking and federal republican publications also influenced anarchists’ ideological formation and social practices. These papers, however, did reflect certain principles that were common to anarchism, such as anticlerical critiques, a great trust in reason, and the celebration of liberty in a broad sense. This chapter focuses on the distribution and circulation of Spanish freethinking newspapers in Spanish-speaking anarchist communities in the United States, presenting a new line of inquiry into Hispanic anarchism and its transnational networks.

In the second half of nineteenth-century Spain, republicanism, especially federalist republicanism, served as an antechamber where many future leaders of anarchism received their political education. Recent studies have analyzed their “double militancy,” encouraged in spaces of socialization such as secular schools, which facilitated the confluence and formation of individuals as well as diverse groups having leftist political inclinations at the turn of the century. Spanish migrants to the United States carried with them a set of values, symbols, and social practices that owed much to this republican imprint.

The freethinking movement that crystalized at the end of the nineteenth century constitutes an excellent example of this confluence of ideas. This movement garnered the sympathies of many republicans, socialists, anarchists, masons, and other dissidents who shared the heterodox theses of its main mouthpiece, the weekly journal Las Dominicales del Libre Pensamiento (The Sunday Supplement of Free Thought). Edited between 1883 and 1909 in Madrid, this paper was well known across Spain. Selfdescribed as republican, the newspaper’s interests went beyond politics. Thanks to its firm defense of religious liberty, its stance against fanaticism, its irreverent and anticlerical critiques, and its habitual publication of notices of civil (nonreligious) celebrations of rites of passage (births, marriages, and deaths), which also contributed to their normalization, the weekly periodical enjoyed the favor of all who opposed the influence of the Catholic church and other traditional powers in Spanish society and culture. Anarchists clearly empathized with such social and familial practices, as is evidenced in the various letters written to the paper.

The weekly was also read in the United States, where its New York correspondent wrote essays that constituted an exceptional historical source of information about transnational politics. Street posters advertised Las Dominicales in New York, where it was supported by a group of subscribers and readers. Spanish (and other Spanish-speaking) factory workers participated in the paper’s campaign and subscription drives, spreading its discourses in a country that the paper’s editors clearly admired and idealized for its progress, particularly in contrast to that of Spain. Given the central role of the nineteenth-century press in the formation of public opinion, the circulation of a journal such as Las Dominicales among Spanishspeaking workers who were sympathetic to freethinking and, in many cases, had embraced, or would soon embrace, anarchism, cannot be overstated. Its presence contributed heterodox standpoints, strengthened ideals, helped reinforce sentiments of belonging, and encouraged the formation of collective identities of immigrants whose political dissidence ranged across various philosophical schools and who maintained ties with their country of origin despite the many other factors that enriched and transformed their cultural baggage on United States soil.

In sum, this chapter develops two analytical perspectives: first, the relationship between republican culture and anarchism in Spain during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in which a freethinking environment conducive for the political socialization of many libertarians took place; second, the continuity of those relations in the United States, as seen in the diffusion and reception of the journal Las Dominicales del Libre Pensamiento. As Pere Gabriel has explained, “anarchism arises in Spain in the context of a democratic and republican popular political culture,” which facilitated “continuity of [its] complex relations with republicanism and freethought.”1

Between Anarchism and Republicanism

For many decades, scholars and researchers (with significant, albeit few, exceptions), have analyzed Spanish republicanism and Spanish anarchism as if they had always been two exclusive political ideologies.2 But recent years have witnessed a growing awareness in academia of the nuanced complexity and closeness of these movements, particularly in their militant bases. Anarchism in Spain, as in the rest of Europe, grew exponentially after the creation of the International Workingmen’s Association (1864)—notwithstanding other factors and antecedents, explored by Clara E. Lida.3 The first groups to join internationalism, in 1869, were integrated by supporters of federal republicanism, which was quite popular among the Spanish working classes.4 In fact, the symbiosis and common ground between internationalism and federal republicanism was so significant that it is not easy to determine where one ended and the other began.5 This is clear in Manuel Morales Muñoz’s examination of the “pairing” that took place between republicanism and internationalism, and other authors have also referred to followers’ “double militancy.”6

Many workers were politically socialized in the ranks of republicanism, and in later years, a great number of these republican workers, especially federalist republicans, ended up in the leading cadres of anarchist and socialist organizations. A growing number of local studies and microhistories have uncovered—and continue to uncover—individual trajectories that illustrate this complex process, showing that these leaders retained multiple cultural referents and personal ties from their republican days.7 The process was gradual, and it was more logical than it would seem at first. This does not mean that it reflected an inexorable path or evolution but merely that it was taken by a great number of ideologically and politically committed workers. After all, the oppositional values that impregnated socialist as well as anarchist movements across the peninsula were aligned with what was essentially Spanish “republicanism’s moral code.”8

Despite the ideological differences known to all, as well as the doctrinal confrontations among leaders and theorists, multiple elements encouraged the confluence of republican and anarchist militants. On the one hand, they shared common values: the belief in reason as the key to attain knowledge; the emancipatory power attributed to education; the defense of secularism and the rejection of clericalism; and the conceptualization of history as progress. These shared values, clearly laid out in the first detailed studies on Spanish anarchism,9 were key hallmarks of identity for both movements’ bases.10 Federalist republicans were particularly committed to secularization, refusing to accept anything but the strictest separation between Church and State, and federalist republican bases’ adamant anticlericalism had an undeniably “filo-anarchist” tone.11 Its active struggle against the asphyxiating hegemony of the Catholic Church even led Emma Goldman to commend Spanish republicanism.12 Other common elements included a desire (however limited) to improve women’s social and political situation,13 an interest in Esperanto, and a particular critique of alcohol consumption.14 Federal republicanism, with its advocacy for local citizen associations and popular political participation as well as its rejection of a strong state, lent itself especially well to libertarian reinterpretations. Pedro Esteve, “the most influential Spanish anarchist in the United States,”15 and whose life and texts are addressed in other chapters of this book, wrote in a very popular pamphlet that “the free and bilateral commutative pact, as Francesc Pi i Margall used to say, must be the tie that binds individuals and groups.”16 Needless to say, Pi i Margall was the most important Spanish federalist republican politician, as well as its most prominent intellectual.

Republicans and anarchists, moreover, employed a common language, which does not fit neatly into the political categories drawn by scholars that necessarily simplify the messiness of reality. This common language was evidenced in the 1885 surveys carried out among the popular classes in accordance with a mandate issued by the country’s Social Reforms Commission. The data from Gijón, a...