During the 20th-century, Spaniards and African-Americans shared significant cultural memories forged by the profound impact that various artistic and historical events had on each other. Addressing three crucial periods (the Harlem Renaissance and Jazz Age, the Spanish Civil War, and Franco's dictatorship), this collection of essays explores the transnational bond and the intercultural exchanges between these two communities, using race as a fundamental critical category. The study of travelogues, memoirs, documentaries, interviews, press coverage, comics, literary works, music, and performances by iconic figures such as Josephine Baker, Langston Hughes, and Ramón Gómez de la Serna, as well as the experiences of ordinary individuals such as African American nurse Salaria Kea, invite an examination of the ambiguities and paradoxes that underlie this relationship: among them, the questionable and, at times, surprising racial representations of blacks in Spanish avant-garde texts and in the press during the years of Franco’s dictatorship; African Americans very unique view of the Spanish Civil War in light of their racial identity; and the oscillation between fascination and anxiety when these two communities look at each other.

The role of Spain in the birth of the United States is a little known and little understood aspect of U.S. independence. Through actual fighting, provision of supplies, and money, Spain helped the young British colonies succeed in becoming an independent nation. Soldiers were recruited from all over the Spanish empire, from Spain itself and from throughout Spanish America. Many died fighting British soldiers and their allies in Central America, the Caribbean, along the Mississippi River from New Orleans to St. Louis and as far north as Michigan, along the Gulf Coast to Mobile and Pensacola, as well as in Europe. Based on primary research in the archives of Spain, this book is about United States history at its very inception, placing the war in its broadest international context. In short, the information in this book should provide a clearer understanding of the independence of the United States, correct a longstanding omission in its history, and enrich its patrimony. It will appeal to anyone interested in the history of the Revolutionary War and in Spain's role in the development of the Americas.

THE LINCOLN BRIGADE The day after Christmas in 1936, a group of ninety-six Americans sailed from New York to help Spain defend its democratic government against fascism. Ultimately, twenty-eight hundred United States volunteers reached Spain to become the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Few Lincolns had any military training. More than half were seriously wounded or died in battle. Most Lincolns were activists and idealists who had worked with and demonstrated for the homeless and unemployed during the Great Depression. They were poets and blue-collar workers, professors and students, seamen and journalists, lawyers and painters, Christians and Jews, blacks and whites. The Brigade was the first fully integrated United States army, and Oliver Law, an African American from Texas, was an early Lincoln commander. William Loren Katz and the late Marc Crawford twice traveled with the Brigade to Spain in the 1980s, interviewed surviving Lincolns on old battlefields, and obtained never-before-published documents and photographs for this book.

The phrase “The Black Legend” was coined in 1912 by a Spanish journalist in protest of the characterization of Spain by other Europeans as a backward country defined by ignorance, superstition, and religious fanaticism, whose history could never recover from the black mark of its violent conquest of the Americas. Challenging this stereotype, Rereading the Black Legend contextualizes Spain’s uniquely tarnished reputation by exposing the colonial efforts of other nations whose interests were served by propagating the “Black Legend.” A distinguished group of contributors here examine early modern imperialisms including the Ottomans in Eastern Europe, the Portuguese in East India, and the cases of Mughal India and China, to historicize the charge of unique Spanish brutality in encounters with indigenous peoples during the Age of Exploration. The geographic reach and linguistic breadth of this ambitious collection will make it a valuable resource for any discussion of race, national identity, and religious belief in the European Renaissance.

Recounts the author's experiences living in Spain as a young black woman, where she learns about the country's racial prejudices against blacks and falls in love with a Spaniard.

The Spanish Craze is the compelling story of the centuries-long U.S. fascination with the history, literature, art, culture, and architecture of Spain. Richard L. Kagan offers a stunningly revisionist understanding of the origins of hispanidad in America, tracing its origins from the early republic to the New Deal. As Spanish power and influence waned in the Atlantic World by the eighteenth century, her rivals created the “Black Legend,” which promoted an image of Spain as a dead and lost civilization rife with innate cruelty and cultural and religious backwardness. The Black Legend and its ambivalences influenced Americans throughout the nineteenth century, reaching a high pitch in the Spanish-American War of 1898. However, the Black Legend retreated soon thereafter, and Spanish culture and heritage became attractive to Americans for its perceived authenticity and antimodernism. Although the Spanish craze infected regions where the Spanish New World presence was most felt—California, the American Southwest, Texas, and Florida—there were also early, quite serious flare-ups of the craze in Chicago, New York, and New England. Kagan revisits early interest in Hispanism among elites such as the Boston book dealer Obadiah Rich, a specialist in the early history of the Americas, and the writers Washington Irving and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He also considers later enthusiasts such as Angeleno Charles Lummis and the many writers, artists, and architects of the modern Spanish Colonial Revival in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Spain’s political and cultural elites understood that the promotion of Spanish culture in the United States and the Western Hemisphere in general would help overcome imperial defeats while uniting Spaniards and those of Spanish descent into a singular raza whose shared characteristics and interests transcended national boundaries. With elegant prose and verve, The Spanish Craze spans centuries and provides a captivating glimpse into distinct facets of Hispanism in monuments, buildings, and private homes; the visual, performing, and cinematic arts; and the literature, travel journals, and letters of its enthusiasts in the United States.

An intersectional history of the shared struggle for African American and Latinx civil rights Spanning more than two hundred years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history, arguing that the “Global South” was crucial to the development of America as we know it. Scholar and activist Paul Ortiz challenges the notion of westward progress as exalted by widely taught formulations like “manifest destiny” and “Jacksonian democracy,” and shows how placing African American, Latinx, and Indigenous voices unapologetically front and center transforms US history into one of the working class organizing against imperialism. Drawing on rich narratives and primary source documents, Ortiz links racial segregation in the Southwest and the rise and violent fall of a powerful tradition of Mexican labor organizing in the twentieth century, to May 1, 2006, known as International Workers’ Day, when migrant laborers—Chicana/os, Afrocubanos, and immigrants from every continent on earth—united in resistance on the first “Day Without Immigrants.” As African American civil rights activists fought Jim Crow laws and Mexican labor organizers warred against the suffocating grip of capitalism, Black and Spanish-language newspapers, abolitionists, and Latin American revolutionaries coalesced around movements built between people from the United States and people from Central America and the Caribbean. In stark contrast to the resurgence of “America First” rhetoric, Black and Latinx intellectuals and organizers today have historically urged the United States to build bridges of solidarity with the nations of the Americas. Incisive and timely, this bottom-up history, told from the interconnected vantage points of Latinx and African Americans, reveals the radically different ways that people of the diaspora have addressed issues still plaguing the United States today, and it offers a way forward in the continued struggle for universal civil rights. 2018 Winner of the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award

This book explores the abolition of African slavery in Spanish Cuba from 1817 to 1886—from the first Anglo-Spanish agreement to abolish the slave trade until the removal from Cuba of the last vestige of black servitude. Making extensive use of heretofore untapped research sources from the Spanish archives, the author has developed new perspectives on nineteenth-century Spanish policy in Cuba. He skillfully interrelates the problem of slavery with international politics, with Cuban conservative and liberal movements, and with political and economic developments in Spain itself. Arthur Corwin finds that the study of this problem falls naturally into two phases, the first of which, 1817–1860, traces the gradual reduction of the African traffic to the Spanish Antilles and constitutes, in effect, a study in Anglo-Spanish diplomacy. He gives special attention here to the aggressive nature of British abolitionist diplomacy and the mounting but generally ineffective indignation resulting from Spanish failure to apply sanctions against the traffic, as well as the increasing North American interest in the annexation of Cuba. The first phase has for its principal theme the manner in which for decades Spain feigned compliance with agreements to end the slave trade while actually protecting slaveholding interests as the best means of holding Cuba. The American Civil War, which destroyed the greatest bulwark of black slavery in the New World, marked the opening of a new phase, 1860–1886. The author strongly emphasizes here such influences as the rise of the Creole reform movement in Cuba and Puerto Rico, which, reading the signs of the times, gave the initial impulse to a Spanish abolitionist movement and contributed to closing the Cuban slave trade in 1866; the liberal revolution of 1868 in Spain and its promise of colonial reforms; the outbreak of the great Creole rebellion in Cuba, 1868–1878, and the abolitionist promises of the rebel chieftains; the threat of American intervention and the abolitionist pressure of American diplomacy; and the protests of the Spanish reactionaries in Spain and Cuba, leading to further procrastination in Madrid. The second phase has as its principal theme the shaping, through all these intertwined factors, of Spain’s first measure of gradual emancipation, the Moret Law of 1870, and all subsequent steps toward abolition.

In 1738, when more than 100 African fugitives had arrived, the Spanish established the fort and town of Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, the first legally sanctioned free black community in what is now the United States. This book tells the story of Fort Mose and the people who lived there. It challenges the notion of the American black experience as simply that of slavery, offering instead a rich and balanced view of the African-American experience in the Spanish colonies from the arrival of Columbus to the American Revolution.

This is a much-needed new overview of Spanish social and political history which sets developments in twentieth-century Spain within a broader European context. Julián Casanova, one of Spain's leading historians, and Carlos Gil Andrés chart the country's experience of democracy, dictatorship and civil war and its dramatic transformation from an agricultural and rural society to an industrial and urban society fully integrated into Europe. They address key questions and issues that continue to be discussed and debated in contemporary historiography, such as why the Republic was defeated, why Franco's dictatorship lasted so long and what mark it has left on contemporary Spain. This is an essential book for students as well as for anyone interested in Spain's turbulent twentieth century.