Between Empires: Spanish Immigrants in the United States (1868–1945)

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, tens of thousands of Spanish peasants, seamen, and workers emigrated to the United States, and settled in an archipelago of tight-knit enclaves that dotted the entire country from Barre, Vermont to Monterey, California, and from Boise, Idaho, to Tampa, Florida. Neither friars nor conquistadors, those tens of thousands of immigrants from Spain who ended up in the United States represent just a tiny percentage of the millions of Spaniards who, in those same years, crossed the Atlantic, most with the goal of settling in various points of the Spanish-speaking Americas. Herein lies one of the best-kept demographic secrets of the American hemisphere: the massive presence of Spaniards in the Americas –South, Central and North– is largely a post-imperial phenomenon. For every Spanish friar or explorer from Spain’s Age of Empire who is commemorated by a statue or a street name in the United States, there would arrive, during the Age of Immigration, thousands of Spanish seamen, nannies, cigar-makers, canners, miners, shopkeepers, sheepherders and steelworkers. But because their stories do not easily fit into any conventional national narrative in either country, these working-class Spaniards are, for the most part, absent from standard historical accounts of both Spanish emigration and US immigration. They are, as it were, invisible immigrants.

Anarchism and the End of Empire

This essay examines the conflict that arose among some Spanish-born (peninsular) cigar makers in New York and Cuban separatists. During the 1890s, a vibrant anarchist community developed in Brooklyn, New York, that published a periodical, El Despertar (1891-1902) and interacted with anarchists in Spain, Florida, and Cuba among other locations. As the conflict between Spanish colonial authority over Cuba became increasingly contentious and violent, tensions between some Cubans and Spaniards increased as well, particularly among Cubans who felt that many Spanish anarchists were indifferent to the separatist cause. Jose C. Campos, a Cuban émigré living in Brooklyn, addressed these issues in a number of essays printed in El Despertar and other workers’ newspapers and attempted to redirect anxiety and anger toward capitalism instead of destructive infighting among Spanish-speaking cigar workers.

Crossing

This chapter illustrates the contradictory backdrop against which José Martí's supporters constructed the Cuban Revolutionary Party. Together, members of the party worked to ensure that in a literal sense, there was no separation into black and white political clubs, or artisan and professional clubs. Several clubs were composed mainly of white cigar makers, with almost no overlap with the membership of La Liga. In addition, there were the clubs associated with La Liga, led by men of color. The chapter reveals that the movement continued to operate against a backdrop in which racial separation, while not absolute, was a regular feature of Cuban social and now political life. Nevertheless, it seems clear that independent organizing was still necessary to mobilize these diverse constituents and to promote diverse leaders, perhaps especially men of color, to positions on the party's Advisory Councils. The fact that some men of color, elected by their own supporters (ideally, including some white workers), occupied a place of honor each time that the party gathered was crucial to the argument that the movement was both unified in common purpose and sincerely democratic.