Spanish Carmen Aldecoa (1904 - 1988) The anarchist and exile networks brought Asturian Carmen Aldecoa to New York in 1940. She in turn supported thousands of refugees, recovered workers’ print culture, and engaged readers in rearticulating the meaning of revolution after the Spanish Civil War. Aldecoa often gave speeches in workers’ associations and speeches at SHC events. She cooperated with several U.S. aid initiatives to support political refugees, as for instance, the Spanish Refugee Aid (SRA), which raised over $5 million and aided 5,500 cases. Anarchist Nancy Macdonald (1910–1996) was the leading figure of the SRA and closely collaborated with Aldecoa and SHC. Both organizations shared their membership lists, executive committee members attended each organizations’ meetings, SRA lawyers helped the SHC refugee deportation cases, and the SHC networks offered assistance to exiles in France. In 1987, Macdonald published her book Homage to the Spanish Exiles: Voices from the Spanish Civil War (1987) based on taped interviews and thus disseminating the voices of the victims of fascism exiled in France.
Aldecoa was a recovery scholar who made sure to document anarchist and worker’s contributions. Aldecoa and her husband anarcho-syndicalist Jesús González Malo established a close friendship with the Rocker family. On the front page of the April 22, 1956 issue of the exile periodical España Libre in Toulouse, Aldecoa recognized Milly Witcop, Jewish anarcho-syndicalist, feminist, writer and activist, and companion of anarcho-syndicalist and German exile Rudolf Rocker. To the patriarchal expectations of the time, Aldecoa presents Witcop as the passionate complement to Rocker, the thinker. However, when the article continues in the inside pages, the tone clearly changes. Her last sentence reclaims Witcop as the creator of Rocker: “Milly Witcop, the fragile and pale girl; all feeling and commitment, has given us Rodolfo Rocker!” With this sentence, Aldecoa acknowledged Witcop as the paperwoman and political thinker that wrote with Rocker (Aldecoa April 22, 1956).
Aldecoa acknowledged another anarchist scholar in her book Del sentir y pensar. Libro primero (1957), Max Nettlau’s collaborator Renée Lamberet (Aldecoa, Del sentir y pensar 115). Nonetheless, is the only woman cited in her manuscript. Aldecoa criticized elitist and colonialist perspectives that disregard the historical contributions of common people to society. Aldecoa credited the proletarian print culture in pre-Spanish Civil War times. The author counted 582 newspapers from 1869 to 1936 and highlighted the role of periodicals in serializing publications and in doing so, educating the people. Aldecoa expressed her concern that such periodicals were not being preserved and thus the historical legacy of workers was being lost. She lamented that their writers were not to be found in anthologies of Spanish literature (Aldecoa, Del sentir y pensar, 183). Therefore, Aldecoa invited scholars to consult the archive and carefully examine workers’ journalism of the era. For Aldecoa, anarchist newspapers promoted “emancipatory ideas and human dignity” in exile and mentioned the more than fifty periodicals written by the Spanish Civil War exiles (Aldecoa, Del sentir y pensar 125-127). Aldecoa praised España Libre for fighting fascism, but she stressed the need to define exile beyond solely an antifascist identity. Similarly to Miqueli, Aldecoa asked anarchists in exile to surpass a simply reactive project against fascism and to construct a free world.