Historias

To this day, thousands of mass graves in towns and the countryside across Spain constitute a grim legacy of the country’s infamous Civil War. Yet these graves themselves have their own politically fraught history as old as the war itself, and they now constitute the most important focal point of Spain’s ongoing debate about how the war should be remembered. In this episode, Dr. Wendy Perla Kurtz traces this history and describes recent efforts to exhume these graves and give the war’s victims a proper burial. She also discusses her own efforts to contribute to the historical memory through her online project, entitled Virtual Cartographies, which is an interactive digital map of all the mass grave sites in Spain where users can access multimedia documentation of commemorations that have taken place at each site.

Prof. Miriam Shadis of Ohio University joins us to explore the powerful roles that queens had in medieval Portugal, including in territorial matters, claims of legitimacy, patronage, military affairs and diplomacy. Beginning with the very founding of the Kingdom of Portugal, Shadis finds that in Portugal the title of queen was not reserved solely for the wife of the king but was also bestowed on other royal women who had political power such as the sisters of the monarch. Shadis considers why the royal women of Portugal had this unique status and how that status changed over the course of the 12th and 13th centuries.

Spain’s own genre of music theater, zarzuela, is one of the country’s most distinctive cultural forms. In this episode, Prof. Clinton Young traces the evolution of the genre in the context of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Spanish history, linking it to the development of the urban middle and working classes. We will listen to selections from several famous zarzuelas along the way, with Young analyzing how zarzuela contributed to Spain’s unique bottom-up nationalization process. Please see the episode webpage for a list of the selections.

The idea of democracy is central to Spanish political culture today, even as the question of exactly what form democracy should take is still highly contested. When did the notion of democracy first enter the Spanish political imagination and how did the idea evolve over time? In this episode, Professor Florencia Peyrou traces the development of Spanish democrats’ political thinking from the mid-nineteenth century through the chaotic Sexenio Revolucionario period (1868-1874) and beyond. Throughout, she presents democracy as a fluid concept that has had multiple meanings throughout the decades as democrats of all stripes navigated the insurrections, coups, riots and conspiracies of mid-nineteenth century Spain.

The usual interpretation of recent Spain history has been that the country was inoculated against the return of the radical right seen in other European countries because of the memory of the Franco dictatorship. However, the rise of Vox and other far right parties in Spain in the last couple of years has called this interpretation into question. Why are these groups gaining strength in Spain now and what links do they have with Spain’s experience with fascism under the Franco regime? In this episode, Professor Louie Dean Valencia-García puts the recent headlines about the return of the radical right to Spain in historical context and considers how new this resurgent far right really is.

Since at least the 19th century, Badajoz Province was the classic example of Spain’s most grievous ills: a harsh landscape where poverty, unemployment and landlessness were endemic. Dave Henderson traces the failed efforts of successive governments to tackle these problems and then explains how the Franco regime sought to take a different approach centered on irrigation, social regulation and land grants to politically reliable farmers. Did the Francoist plan transform the landscape and society of Spain’s poorest region? Henderson argues that it did, but in a manner far different from what government planners had envisioned.

Antonio José Martínez Palacios was one of the most promising composers of early twentieth-century Spain. From his humble beginnings as a musical prodigy from the provincial capital of Burgos, the composer (known as Antonio José) won praise for his choral works and orchestral pieces, drawing inspiration from his native Castile. But as a proponent of education and Republican values in a deeply conservative town, Antonio José was murdered by a Falange militia at the beginning of the Civil War in an execution that has been compared to that of poet Federico García Lorca. For some 40 years, the Franco regime banned performances of Antonio José’s music, but his oeuvre has been rediscovered in recent decades. In this episode, Robert Long, a musician and a professor of history at Elgin Community College, traces the life, death, silencing and recuperation of this composer through listening to and analyzing several selections of Antonio José’s music. We begin with the second movement (Balada: Lento y apasionado) of

The SS commando Otto Skorzeny was the most notorious Nazi to hid out in Spain after the Second World War. Yet, far from staying hidden, Skorzeny made frequent appearances in the Spanish media through the Franco period. In this episode, part of our series on Nazis in Spain, Prof. Joshua Goode of Claremont Graduate University explores how Skorzeny was able to reinvent himself to stay in the public eye as the Franco regime evolved. In so doing, Goode challenges the view that after the World War II the Franco regime always hid its previous connections to the Nazis. He also considers how the Francoist portrayal of Nazism shaped Spain’s incomplete confrontation with the Holocaust in recent decades.

This month, Daniel Hershenzon, author of The Captive Sea: Slavery, Commerce, and Communication in Early Modern Spain and the Mediterranean, discusses slavery and ransoming practices on both the Christian and Muslim sides of the early modern Mediterranean, focusing on the seventeenth century. Hershenzon presents Mediterranean slavery as creating an unintentional system of communication and economic exchange across geographical, political and religious boundaries. In this episode, we explore how friars, merchants, family members and rulers all participated in the ransoming process and consider one particularly complex case of prisoner exchange negotiations as an example of how the ransoming system worked.

Between 1940 and 1945, some 7,200 Spanish Republican exiles were held captive in Nazi Germany’s notorious Mauthausen concentration camp. In this episode, part of our series on the Nazis and Spain, Sara J. Brenneis, author of Spaniards in Mauthausen: Representations of a Nazi Concentration Camp, 1940-2015, discusses examples of how the Spanish in Mauthausen were remembered in Spain, from the time of the Franco regime up until today. In each case, from prisoners who clandestinely kept records from inside the camp to accounts that made it past the censorship of the Franco years to recent works of “postmemory” such as a graphic novel and a twitter feed, Brenneis considers how historical context can shape the memory of this Spanish encounter with the horrors of the Nazi regime.

Immediately following the Spanish Civil War, Spain faced a terrible food crisis. Suzanne Dunai examines how the policies of the early Franco dictatorship brought on this crisis and how ordinary Spaniards, particularly women, dealt with it on a day-to-day basis. From ration cards to bartering, from canning to buying on the black market, Spanish women showed a remarkable resilience as they sought to feed their families in this time of devastating scarcity.

Like most other Europeans, the Basques of southern France had to endure a puppet government and Nazi occupation during the Second World War. What was it like to live under occupation? How did Basque culture influence the ways in which French Basques both collaborated with and resisted the Germans? For the third part of our series on the Nazis in Iberian history, Professor Sandra Ott takes an ethnographic approach to answering these questions, using the stories of individuals and families to reveal just how complex and difficult different individuals’ strategies for living under occupation could be. Danger, duplicity and revenge are all themes in these real-life tales fit for a spy novel.

Even as the enslavement of black Africans became widespread in the Atlantic World and modern racism was developing, the veneration of black saints was also on the rise in the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America. In this episode, Professor Erin Rowe discusses who these saints were and who venerated them. We consider how hagiographers argued that these holy people of African descent could be saintly at a time when many questioned the ability of non-whites to be fully Christian. We also examine how the sculptures of these saints celebrate their blackness as part of their spirituality, suggesting that even in this period of slavery, ideas and discourses about race were far from homogeneous.

The bombing of the Basque town of Gernika on April 26, 1937 by the planes of Germany’s Condor Legion, fighting for Franco’s rebel forces during the Spanish Civil War, today stands in the historical memory as one of our most powerful reminders of the horrors of war, thanks in no small part to Picasso’s famous painting. But what were the Germans trying to accomplish in this terror bombing, how exactly did the events of that day unfold and did the Germans achieve their goals? In this second part of our series on Nazis in Spain, Xabier Irujo, Director of the Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada- Reno, answers these questions as well as addresses the aftereffects of an event that we still remember with horror more than 80 years later.

In this episode, guest A. Katie Harris delves into the elite but also secretive world of relic collecting in the in the early modern Mediterranean. She describes the at-times nefarious practices of relic dealers and thieves and grave robbers, and considers to what extent relics can be viewed as commodities in a market even though the Church prohibited their sale. We then turn to the bizarre story of the theft of the remains of San Juan de Mata in 1655 by Trinitarian monks and discuss what the complicated saga of these bones reveals about the changing way in which sacred material objects were understood in the early modern world.

This episode focuses on two recent Spanish-language films that comment on the Spanish Civil War, the Franco dictatorship and the transition to democracy: Devil’s Backbone (El espinazo del diablo) by Guillermo del Toro and Bad Education (Mala Educación) by Pedro Almodóvar. Interestingly, both films feature abused children, boarding schools for boys, strongly masculine but corrupted male characters and few female characters. How do these filmmakers’ efforts to comment on Spain’s recent past lead them to so many similar themes? What do these films reveal about not only the trauma of war and dictatorship but also Spain’s collective memories of the past? Jessica Davidson, an associate professor at James Madison University, will consider these questions as she analyzes these two disturbing but also thought-provoking films. While it is not necessary to do so, listeners will benefit from having watched the films in advance, and there are a few spoilers.

We might associate the sociolinguistic ideas of codeswitching and diglossia more with our own globalized world than with the Middle Ages, but Professor Antonio Zaldívar argues that these practices could have powerful connotations as the kings of Aragon struggled to increase their authority over the nobility in the 13th century. In discussing how these kings began to use the vernacular in responding to noble defiance letters and in requests for support, Zaldívar explores the development modern governing structures and official written communications.

UC San Diego Professor Pamela Radcliff has recently published a new history of modern Spain entitled Modern Spain: 1808 to the Present. In this episode, we discuss the challenges overcome and insights gained from this project, starting with how Radcliff developed a new framework for the history of modern Spain that neither told a narrative of failure nor presented a revisionist story that ignored the darker sides of the modernization process. Instead, she explains how she provides a history of Spanish “modernity with all its warts” even as she navigates the politically polarized historiographies of the Second Republic and Civil War periods and concludes by grappling with the current situation in Catalonia, for instance. In short, the episode provides a behind-the-scenes look at the development of a book that is sure to prove a new foundation for students and scholars of modern Spain.

When the French invaded Spain in 1808 and imprisoned the royal family, the country was thrown into chaos, with local councils, or juntas, taking governance into their own hands. Charles Nicholas Saenz discusses how these groups sought to establish supremacy, authority and legitimacy in this unprecedented situation. Even as their elite memberships sought to prevent revolution from spreading to Spain, they created new governing structures that could never be erased. They unwittingly brought Spain into the modern period while making the local an indelible force in Spanish political culture.

At the end of the Second World War, hundreds of Nazi spies remained in Spain, and the Allies feared those agents could keep Nazism alive under the Franco dictatorship. In this episode, Professor David Messenger traces the allied effort to repatriate men to Germany for denazification. How successful was the repatriation program? What was the fate of the Germans who were deported? Messenger considers these questions before concluding with the implications of his work on the repatriation program for our understanding of both the Franco regime and postwar Europe more broadly.