CONTENTS List of Illustrations ix Preface and Acknowledgments xiii Introduction Ana Varela-COPYRIGHTED Lago and Phylis Cancilla MATERIAL Martinelli 3 1. Working in AmericaNOT and FORLiving in DISTRIBUTIONSpain: The Making of Transnational Communities among Spanish Immigrants in the United States Ana Varela- Lago 21 2. The Andalucía- Hawaii- California Migration: A Study in Macrostructure and Microhistory Beverly Lozano 66 3. Spanish Anarchism in Tampa, Florida, 1886– 1931 Gary R. Mormino and George E. Pozzetta† 91 viii CONTENTS 4. “Yours for the Revolution”: Cigar Makers, Anarchists, and Brooklyn’s Spanish Colony, 1878– 1925 Christopher J. Castañeda 129 5. Pageants, Popularity Contests, and Spanish Identities in 1920s New York Brian D. Bunk 175 6. Miners from Spain to Arizona Copper Camps, 1880– 1930 Phylis Cancilla Martinelli 206 7. From the Mountains and Plains of Spain to the Hills and Hollers of West Virginia: Spanish Immigration into Southern West Virginia in the Early Twentieth Century Thomas Hidalgo 246 8. “Spanish Hands for the American Head?”: Spanish Migration to the United States and the Spanish State Ana Varela- Lago 285 Postscript. Hidden No Longer: Spanish Migration and the Spanish Presence in the United States Ana Varela- Lago and Phylis Cancilla Martinelli 320 List of Contributors 329 Index 333 COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION MAP 0.1. Map of Spain COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION INTRODUCTION Ana Varela- Lago and Phylis Cancilla Martinelli In his book Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States, historian Felipe Fernández- Armesto challenges the conventional narrative of American his- tory. “Instead of looking at the making of the United States from the east,” he explains, “we see what it looks like from the south, with Anglo- America injected or intruded into a Hispanic- accented account.”1 Echoing the title of Jose Martí’sCOPYRIGHTED celebrated essay, Fernández- MATERIALArmesto’s volume r epresents an important additionNOT to a growing FOR body DISTRIBUTION of literature that illuminates the rich and complex history of the United States, where the Anglo-Saxon heritage is one among many. As the director of the Spanish foundation that sponsored the project asserts in the foreword, this is also “a book on the presence of Spain in the history of America.”2 Attention to the legacy of the Spanish past in the United States, building on the pioneering work of nineteenth- century scholars such as Herbert Howe Bancroft and Herbert Eugene Bolton, is not confined to the realm of academia. It also plays a significant role in the present-day interactions between the two nations, as a 2013 visit to the United States by Felipe DOI: 10.5876/9781607327998.c000 4 ANA VARELA-LAGO AND PHYLIS CANCILLA MARTINELLI de Borbón (then Crown Prince of Spain) and his wife illustrates. The royal tour included two of the states most associated with the Spanish presence in North America: California and Florida. In California, the delegation stopped at the Huntington Library to see the Junípero Serra exhibit, commemorat- ing the tercentennial of the birth of the Spanish Franciscan and his role in the construction of the network of Catholic missions in California, two of which were also visited by the royal couple. In Florida, Prince Felipe observed the quincentennial of the landing of Juan Ponce de León in 1513, noting in his speech: “We cannot imagine today’s United States without its Spanish legacy.”3 In 2015, a year after his proclamation as King of Spain, Felipe VI returned to Florida to commemorate the 450th anniversary of the founding of the city of Saint Augustine, the oldest European settlement in the United States, by the Asturian Pedro Menéndez de Avilés. This book, too, examines the relations between Spain and the United States. The contributors, however, focus not on the conquistadores and padres of yore, but on more recent arrivals— Spanish immigrants who reached American shores in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Immigrants such as Salustiano Sánchez Blázquez, who as a teenager left his village in the prov- ince of Salamanca and went to Cuba to work cutting cane in the island’s sugar fields. In 1920, he moved to the United States, toiling in the mines of Kentucky and Pennsylvania before settling at Niagara Falls in the early 1930s. Sánchez Blázquez’s story received media attention because when he died, in 2013, he was believed to be the world’s oldest living man.4 Thousands of his compatriots followed a similar path, but their names seldom graced the pages of the newspapers. AlthoughCOPYRIGHTED research on Spanish migration MATERIAL to the United States has increased in recent decades,NOT it remains FOR in its DISTRIBUTION infancy. In Spain, studies of emigration to the Americas have concentrated primarily on Latin American countries, which received the bulk of the Spanish exodus in the period of “mass migra- tion” (1880– 1930).5 Still, in the past few years Spanish scholars have produced a number of regional studies, complementing the original work by Germán Rueda on the recent migration of Spaniards to the United States.6 Bieito Alonso, Nancy Pérez Rey, Ana Varela-Lago, Juan Manuel Pérez, Carolina García Borrazás, and Francisco Sieiro Benedetto investigated the migration of Galicians to New York, Florida, Louisiana, and the Panama Canal.7 Luis Argeo documented the migration of Asturians to the mines of West Virginia, and Introduction 5 Carlos Tarazona Grasa that of Aragonese shepherds to the American West.8 María José García Hernandorena, Joan Frances Mira, Teresa Morell Moll, and Enric Morrió have studied the migration of Valencians to New York.9 In the United States, too, despite important contributions, the study of Spanish migration has lagged behind that of other communities. Basques have been the group more widely and systematically studied on both sides of the Atlantic, thanks in part to the formidable work of the Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno, and the support from the Basque government.10 Yet, to Rosendo Adolfo Gómez’s 1962 pathbreak- ing article “Spanish Immigration to the United States,” we can now add a collection of journal articles, encyclopedia entries, master theses, doctoral dissertations, and video documentaries that enhance our understanding of this phenomenon.11 The most recent addition to this list is an extraordinary collection of over 300 images of Spanish immigrants. The result of years of work and dedication by James D. Fernández and Luis Argeo, with the collaboration of local immigrant communities, this photographic archive is just one aspect of an ongoing project that seeks to recover and document the richness of the Spanish immigrant experience in the United States.12 Hidden Out in the Open is the first book- length study, in English, of the mod- ern migration of Spaniards to the United States.13 It represents an attempt to fill the gap in the research literature on this group, so intimately linked to the history of the Americas and of the United States. The essays cover a period (1875– 1930) defined by the crucial transformations of the Progressive Era in the United States, and by similarly momentous changes in Spain fol- lowing the Restoration of the Bourbon monarchy under Alfonso XII. These include the warsCOPYRIGHTED of independence in Cuba, MATERIAL the loss of the last remnants of the Spanish empireNOT in 1898, FORand social DISTRIBUTION and political mobilizations that culmi- nated in the fall of the monarchy and the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic in 1931. The defeat of the Republic, after the 1936 military coup that led to the Spanish Civil War and General Francisco Franco’s victory in 1939, falls outside the scope of this collection. Readers interested in the response of Spanish immigrant communities in the United States to these events can consult a diverse and growing body of research on the subject.14 The chapters in this volume are geographically wide-ranging. They reflect the transnational nature of the Spanish diaspora in the Americas, encompass- ing networks that connected Spain, Cuba (and a number of Latin American 6 ANA VARELA-LAGO AND PHYLIS CANCILLA MARTINELLI countries), the United States, and American-controlled territories in Hawai‘i and Panama. The diversity of locations also reveals the variety of jobs the immigrants engaged in, from construction gangs in the Panama Canal and the Florida Keys to mining crews in Arizona and West Virginia. In Hawai‘i, Spaniards planted and cut cane in sugar plantations. Farming remained their main occupation as they moved from the islands to the fields and canneries of California at the turn of the twentieth century. In Brooklyn, and in Tampa, Florida, Spaniards toiled in a peculiar combination of craft and industry. In factories large and small, the sound of the chavetas (cigar knives) mixed with the voice of the lectores (readers) as workers, seated at their benches, hand- rolled high- quality Clear Havana cigars. The industry had its roots in Cuba but moved to the United States as a result of political unrest when the Cuban movement for independence gained strength during the nineteenth century. Our selection of topics does not pretend to cover the full dimension of the Spanish immigrant experience in the United States. The very nature of this (unevenly developed) field would prevent that. As editors, our aim has been to showcase a diversity of approaches, even if all our contributors had a common focus. We also pay tribute to the pioneering work of scholars such as Beverly Lozano, Gary R. Mormino, and the late George E. Pozzetta, who in the 1980s were introducing the Spanish experience into the “mainstream” of American immigration history. While the book concentrates on a specific national group, its goal is to place the Spanish migrants in a broader context.