Historias: The Spanish History Podcast

Immediately following the Spanish Civil War, Spain faced a terrible food crisis. Suzanne Dunai examines how the policies of the early Franco dictatorship brought on this crisis and how ordinary Spaniards, particularly women, dealt with it on a day-to-day basis. From ration cards to bartering, from canning to buying on the black market, Spanish women showed a remarkable resilience as they sought to feed their families in this time of devastating scarcity.

Like most other Europeans, the Basques of southern France had to endure a puppet government and Nazi occupation during the Second World War. What was it like to live under occupation? How did Basque culture influence the ways in which French Basques both collaborated with and resisted the Germans? For the third part of our series on the Nazis in Iberian history, Professor Sandra Ott takes an ethnographic approach to answering these questions, using the stories of individuals and families to reveal just how complex and difficult different individuals’ strategies for living under occupation could be. Danger, duplicity and revenge are all themes in these real-life tales fit for a spy novel.

Even as the enslavement of black Africans became widespread in the Atlantic World and modern racism was developing, the veneration of black saints was also on the rise in the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America. In this episode, Professor Erin Rowe discusses who these saints were and who venerated them. We consider how hagiographers argued that these holy people of African descent could be saintly at a time when many questioned the ability of non-whites to be fully Christian. We also examine how the sculptures of these saints celebrate their blackness as part of their spirituality, suggesting that even in this period of slavery, ideas and discourses about race were far from homogeneous.

The bombing of the Basque town of Gernika on April 26, 1937 by the planes of Germany’s Condor Legion, fighting for Franco’s rebel forces during the Spanish Civil War, today stands in the historical memory as one of our most powerful reminders of the horrors of war, thanks in no small part to Picasso’s famous painting. But what were the Germans trying to accomplish in this terror bombing, how exactly did the events of that day unfold and did the Germans achieve their goals? In this second part of our series on Nazis in Spain, Xabier Irujo, Director of the Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada- Reno, answers these questions as well as addresses the aftereffects of an event that we still remember with horror more than 80 years later.

In this episode, guest A. Katie Harris delves into the elite but also secretive world of relic collecting in the in the early modern Mediterranean. She describes the at-times nefarious practices of relic dealers and thieves and grave robbers, and considers to what extent relics can be viewed as commodities in a market even though the Church prohibited their sale. We then turn to the bizarre story of the theft of the remains of San Juan de Mata in 1655 by Trinitarian monks and discuss what the complicated saga of these bones reveals about the changing way in which sacred material objects were understood in the early modern world.

This episode focuses on two recent Spanish-language films that comment on the Spanish Civil War, the Franco dictatorship and the transition to democracy: Devil’s Backbone (El espinazo del diablo) by Guillermo del Toro and Bad Education (Mala Educación) by Pedro Almodóvar. Interestingly, both films feature abused children, boarding schools for boys, strongly masculine but corrupted male characters and few female characters. How do these filmmakers’ efforts to comment on Spain’s recent past lead them to so many similar themes? What do these films reveal about not only the trauma of war and dictatorship but also Spain’s collective memories of the past? Jessica Davidson, an associate professor at James Madison University, will consider these questions as she analyzes these two disturbing but also thought-provoking films. While it is not necessary to do so, listeners will benefit from having watched the films in advance, and there are a few spoilers.

We might associate the sociolinguistic ideas of codeswitching and diglossia more with our own globalized world than with the Middle Ages, but Professor Antonio Zaldívar argues that these practices could have powerful connotations as the kings of Aragon struggled to increase their authority over the nobility in the 13th century. In discussing how these kings began to use the vernacular in responding to noble defiance letters and in requests for support, Zaldívar explores the development modern governing structures and official written communications.

UC San Diego Professor Pamela Radcliff has recently published a new history of modern Spain entitled Modern Spain: 1808 to the Present. In this episode, we discuss the challenges overcome and insights gained from this project, starting with how Radcliff developed a new framework for the history of modern Spain that neither told a narrative of failure nor presented a revisionist story that ignored the darker sides of the modernization process. Instead, she explains how she provides a history of Spanish “modernity with all its warts” even as she navigates the politically polarized historiographies of the Second Republic and Civil War periods and concludes by grappling with the current situation in Catalonia, for instance. In short, the episode provides a behind-the-scenes look at the development of a book that is sure to prove a new foundation for students and scholars of modern Spain.

When the French invaded Spain in 1808 and imprisoned the royal family, the country was thrown into chaos, with local councils, or juntas, taking governance into their own hands. Charles Nicholas Saenz discusses how these groups sought to establish supremacy, authority and legitimacy in this unprecedented situation. Even as their elite memberships sought to prevent revolution from spreading to Spain, they created new governing structures that could never be erased. They unwittingly brought Spain into the modern period while making the local an indelible force in Spanish political culture.

At the end of the Second World War, hundreds of Nazi spies remained in Spain, and the Allies feared those agents could keep Nazism alive under the Franco dictatorship. In this episode, Professor David Messenger traces the allied effort to repatriate men to Germany for denazification. How successful was the repatriation program? What was the fate of the Germans who were deported? Messenger considers these questions before concluding with the implications of his work on the repatriation program for our understanding of both the Franco regime and postwar Europe more broadly.