Exile and Cultural Hegemony: Spanish Intellectuals in Mexico, 1939-1975

Preface

ix Preface This book is about Spanish intellectuals who were exiled to Mexico during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939–75) that followed the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), and about their struggle for cultural hegemony based on the claim that the Republic, not Francoism, represented the “true” culture of the Spanish nation. The account of the Spaniards’ cultural production presented here will be, above all, critical; it will attempt to avoid the mythifying tendencies that have marred much of the existing work on Spanish Civil War exile. Starting in the years of the Popular Front, this book analyzes the Spaniards’ changing conception of their social role as intellectuals, the relation between culture and politics, and Spain’s position in the modern world. I argue that the Spaniards’ dependence on the increasingly authoritarian Mexican regime, their misplaced illusions of pan-Hispanist grandeur, and, more in general, the international climate of the Cold War caused them to abandon the Gramscian ideal of the intellectual as political activist in favor of a more liberal, apolitical stance favored by, among others, the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset. What distinguishes this book from existing studies in English or Spanish is, in the first place, its critical framework, which combines methods of literary criticism with insights from history and political science. The thought of Antonio Gramsci is of central importance to my argument. Gramsci functions both as the historical representation of Popular Front philosophy and the theoretical reference point against which to measure the ideological evolution of the Spanish exiles. Second, Exile and Cultural P R E F A C E x Hegemony is the first study of its kind to place the exiles’ ideological evolution in a broad historical context, taking into account developments in both Spanish and Mexican politics from the early 1930s through the 1960s and 1970s. In the third place, this book gives ample attention to the hitherto untouched topic of Spanish left-wing nationalism, pointing out its sometimes awkward overlaps with the rhetoric of pan-Hispanist glory employed by the ideologues of the Franco regime. Exile and Cultural Hegemony tells a story of intellectual retreat and eventual political paralysis. It shows how the Republican defeat and the subsequent political exile thwarted the development of a group of intellectuals who, in the 1930s, had battled for a new conception of culture, a new political system, and a new relationship between intellectuals and the masses. Aside from its contribution to Spanish intellectual history, this book hopes to be more generally relevant to exile or diaspora studies as well. An important underlying argument is that exiles’ cultural production cannot properly be understood within the framework of traditional literary studies. To be sure, it is never possible to separate literature proper from the sociological and political context of its production. Exile, however, connects those fields in a very explicit way. For the exile, the simple act of writing becomes expressly political—sometimes to the point that literary fiction gives way to autobiography and memoir or to the polemic immediacy of the essay or the pamphlet. At times, the conditions of exile even made epic realism impossible, as I will argue for the case of Max Aub. Correspondingly, the body of texts studied in this book is quite heterogeneous ; it includes editorials, short stories, novels, diaries, poems, and journalism. But the phenomenon of exile not only transcends disciplinary boundaries . It also supersedes the national borders that literary studies have tended carefully to respect. This is one of the reasons, incidentally, why many exile writers have fallen through the cracks of literary history. One of the aspects that distinguishes this book from previous scholarship on Spanish Republican exile is that it places the phenomenon in the political , social, and institutional context of both the home and host country, that is, of Spain and Mexico. In most studies on the Spaniards in Mexico, for instance, Mexican politics are either absent or reduced to superficial references to noble leaders whose consistent refusal to recognize Franco Preface xi is adduced as sufficient proof of their good faith. This study does not take that good faith at face value. The overall aim of this book, then, is to suggest ways in which one might develop a more nuanced and critical view of the exiled intellectuals ’ place and role in the complex constellations of both Spanish and Mexican history. It does so, among other things, by emphasizing the...