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AURELIO PEGO
(Valladolid 1896 - La Coruña 1978)
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Aurelio Pego (Aurelio Antonio Pego Canido) (Valladolid 1896 - La Coruña 1978) escaped a military family and life in Spain by migrating to the United States in 1918. Soon after Pego arrived in New York, he started voluntarily corresponding for Spanish newspapers to get experience. He wrote genres in demand: immigration chronicles. He began to write commissioned pieces for numerous papers in the Americas and Spain two years later.
Since his arrival, Pego was also an active participant in the Hispanic social scene of the city. In 1924, Pego was New York Club Galicia’s secretary, affiliated with the confederation of Hispanic Societies, a confederation of workers and grassroots organizations. In the United States, I corresponded for several Hispanic newspapers and worked as a clerk in several businesses. In an article published in CNT (Mexico), Pego admitted that he would have preferred to devote his writing career entirely to labor newspapers, but he had to make a living.
Immigration Chronicles
Pego published a compilation of some of his first immigration chronicles in Como ovejas descarriadas (Like Lost Sheep, 1933). Humor is a prime component of these texts about his experience as an immigrant in New York. Pego qualified his chronicles as “lost sheep” in the prologue because they were published in periodicals in Costa Rica, Mexico and Spain.
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See: Feu, “Chronicling the Modern US: Aurelio Pego’s Immigration Journalism.” in Americanized Spanish Culture: Stories and Storytellers of Dislocated Empires, eds Christopher J. Castañeda and Miguel Bota. New York: Routledge 2022, 62-75.
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"The antifascist may be a revolutionary, and because he is so, he is a sentimental man. Without sentiment, there is no
revolution. Hence, the antifascist who becomes a poet acts logically and naturally. Unable to pour his sentiment into his
profession, he pours it rhythmically onto the page. It dignifies a professional antifascist. Yes, friends, antifascism is the tears we
hold back that become a rage." (Aurelio Pego "Doctor in Antifascism. "España Libre March 31, 1944).
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España Libre and its predecessor, Frente Popular (1936-1939), were the longest-sustained bilingual periodicals devoted to their antifascist cause, mainly through workers’ organization and mutual aid. The journals were published by the Sociedades Hispanas Confederadas (SHC), a confederation of about two hundred U.S. cultural and mutual assistance societies that grew to 65,000 members at its height in the 1940s.
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Pego Joined España Libre in 1940 as a staff writer when he was already a renowned journalist. Castilla Morales praised Pego’s work and admitted that they were often the only two people editing the periodical. After his tenure as editor, Pego generously mentored other editors, and his popular satirical chronicles ran until the paper closed its doors in 1977. Pego’s rhetorical bombs unveiled the terror of the Franco regime, lampooned US diplomatic relations with Francisco Franco, and mocked the Spanish exiles’ unsuccessful efforts to liberate Spain from the dictator. Pego shared a militant antifascism with his readers and captivated them with his witty double meanings.
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He moved to Puerto Rico in 1952 and was an executive member of Pro-Democracia Española (Pro-Spanish Democracy), an SHC-affiliated association that reported on antifascist activism in Puerto Rico. Federico de Onís joined him a few years later.
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Listen to the English translation. Reader Tristan Velazquez
Pego mocked the pillars of Spanish Fascism: the unique leader, the National Catholicism, and the Fascist State. In “The Ambassador of the Epitaphs” (13 July 1951), he imagines how difficult it must be for the US ambassador to Spain, Stanton Griffis. ​
Listen to the English translation. Reader Tristan Velazquez
Aurelio Pego’s sarcasm kept everyone on their toes. In ”Do we Resurrect her?”, the journalist writes his chronicle to commemorate the Spanish Second Republic proclaimed on 14 April 1931.
Listen to the English translation. Reader Tristan Velazquez
Aurelio Pego's chronicle on students' strikes in Barcelona. Pego created a literary alter ego, Roque Barca, who fought fascism no longer as a militia man would do in the 1930s but as a postmodern revolutionary: with fake news!
See Recovery Blog Entry about the historical context of this chronicle.