UC San Diego

This dissertation examines the social and political relations that emerged between Mexican laborers and Spanish political refugees between 1939 and 1959. Following the collapse of the Second Spanish Republic (1936-1939) and the ascension of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939-1975), Mexico granted 20,000 Spaniards political asylum. The initiative marked the first time and only time in world history that a formerly colonized nation granted political asylum to inhabitants of its imperial metropole. As Mexican campesinos and workers navigated, defined, and challenged the parameters of their country’s social revolution (1906-1940), their acceptance or rejection of Spanish exiles depended on their communities’ historical relationships to land, radical thought, and the Mexican state. My dissertation therefore examines specific sites of Spanish settlement to determine how encounters between local populations and refugees challenged the Mexican state’s conceptions of class, race, and citizenship.

Using archival sources collected from Mexico, Spain, the United States, and the Netherlands, my dissertation analyzes the ways workers and peasants from both countries shaped their sociocultural viewpoints and ideological convictions through their respective struggles for land, autonomy, and democracy. I argue that for many Mexican peasants and industrial laborers, the exiles were not descendants of the Spanish colonizers that previously exploited their nation, but rather as allies who invigorated the ideals and possibilities of the Mexican Revolution through their own radicalism and civil war. My reading of the Mexican Revolution as a key moment in twentieth-century global, rather than a regional, revolutionary struggle—a flashpoint for intense debates regarding equality, decolonization, and transnational solidarity—is enabled through a mapping of social relations between Mexicans and Spanish immigrants prior to, during, and after the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). Subsequently, this research explores the transnational formation of radical social consciousness, the politics of exile within postcolonial contexts, as well as the impact of social revolution on notions of belonging, difference, and community.