Miguel Martín Alonso I Almería, (EFE).- Between the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, tens of thousands of Spaniards traveled to the United States to earn a living in all kinds of jobs, an ignored story that has now been recovered of their heirs through the exhibition ‘Invisible Emigrants. Spaniards in the US (1868-1945)’.
This traveling exhibition comes to Almería to make visible the disintegrated history of tens of thousands of Spanish workers and peasants, curated by New York University professor James D. Fernández (New York, 1961), and journalist and filmmaker Luis Argeo (Asturias , 1975).
It is made up of 300 photographs, objects, documents and audiovisual material selected from the immense archive guarded by the curators, made up of more than 15,000 records from family albums and boxes of memories treasured by the descendants of emigrants.
The exhibition has served for several of these heirs to visit Almería, such as Michael Muñoz Campos, who reminds EFE how his grandparents arrived from Úbeda (Jaén), San Roque (Cádiz), Jimena de la Frontera (Cádiz) and a town of Salamanca, in different ships that arrived in Hawaii between 1912 and 1920.
Next to him is, in others, Ángel Briongos, a descendant of one of the families that returned to Spain before the Civil War, in this case to a small town in Burgos, where not even his own children knew his tour of Niagara Falls or New Mexico.
work on plantations
Michael Muñoz’s grandparents worked on sugarcane and pineapple plantations as day laborers, “very hard, very difficult” work. “The Spanish had been recruited in part to break a strike by Asian day laborers, who had started to unionize,” he explains.
“Whole families went to Hawaii, parents, children, sometimes grandparents, and they all work in the fields, apart from the sugar cane plantations. The Asian workers were singles who came from China, the Philippines or Korea for the harvest and then returned to their countries. The plan here was to colonize the islands, not just have labor”, he adds.
Years later, he was born in San Leandro, California, a “migrant town” with Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and interior Americans who moved to California during the Great Depression. “I grew up without feeling a victim of any prejudice because we all had more or less the same situation, we were newcomers,” he recounts.
His family could not return to Spain because they supported the Republic during the Civil War. “They helped with money and clothes, they sent packages to their relatives, but going back was never an option,” he says.
Michael himself became involved in the US with the union movement. “Few members of my family went to college. To survive and progress in life, the path lay through the union organization. I worked as a marine carpenter and then I led the union of this guild, ”he reveals.
Throughout my life I learned from my family that you have to defend rights and fight together for these rights. If we have to fight, we also fight”, he adds.
those who returned
It is the second time that he visits Spain. On his first trip, he was surprised to look more like the Spanish than his fellow citizens, and on this occasion he claims to be “shocked” by being able to visit the places where his grandparents were born. “I love the country, the people are affectionate, the cities are clean… I love it,” he asserts.
“For us the story is precious, in the sense that it is very intimate. In my case, one of the paradigms of the exhibition is fulfilled, making a kind of backup copy of a family memory”, Ángel Briongos tells EFE.
Even her own grandmother was unaware of what her grandfather and father had done for almost two decades in the United States.
From a young age, he saw this trip as something almost “mythological” and began to investigate until he found James and Luis and reconstructed an incident from which “only an old trunk and a photo remained in the attic”.
Something that has allowed him to find out that they entered through Ellis Island, and how they had lived in Niagara Falls; even curious details such as his grandfather possibly “fleeing from the war” and found that he was almost recruited for World War I.
The exhibition
However, many of the details of what his ancestors did there have been lost, although he knows that in Niagara Falls they worked in abrasives and aluminum factories, or that one of them was in an “eminently mining” town in New Mexico.
When they returned to their town in Burgos, “they didn’t tell much.” “In the history of the family they were left as losers. Perhaps they considered that it was not of interest to people from this town in deep Castilla. For me it was important to be able to tell my grandmother before she stopped being with us about those very special moments that her father and her grandfather lived, ”she says.
James and Luis explain to EFE that they began to investigate in parallel, one in the US and the other in Spain. James is the grandson of Asturians and thought that they were a “rare bird”, and that of his family an “isolated story”, until he saw that there were tens of thousands of similar cases.
Luis experienced the visit of American relatives to his grandmother from a young age, and went through a process similar to that of James when trying to understand when and why they came to this country.
They conclude that the main reason for emigrating was work, the need to seek “more dignity, well-being” and progress. “The exhibition tells in six chapters the archetypal journey of a Spanish emigrant who goes to the United States, probably almost always with the idea of returning.”
“After the vicissitudes of life and geopolitics, this emigrant ends up staying in the United States. We have used personal memories and both in materials and in memory of the descendants of those emigrants”, they finally detail. EFE