The Territorial Dimension of Spanish Republican Exile in the Cities of Argentina

Abstract

This article aims to approach the human dimensions of exile by focusing in the experience of a group of Spanish republican intellectuals settled in the cities of Bahía Blanca and La Plata in the 1936-1975 period. It’ll try to reconstruct, from a historical perspective, the territoriality of the associative, academic, cultural and political networks in which the exiles where integrated. Taking into account their sociodemographic and political heterogeneity (generations, ethnic groups, gender, class pertaininship, escape context, ideological affiliations), this work inquires their forms of social and civic insertion since their arrival in their particular city, acknowledging that what’s local (territorial dynamics of center/periphery in their interior) can’t be comprehended outside of the transnational (expelling countries/receptive countries dynamic) and national (Buenos Aires/Interior dynamic) dimensions.Starting from a situated analysis and case studies, this article aims to contribute -through the creation of comparative analysis categories, cartographical mappings concerning the territorialization of networks, and interpretative models for their use as sources about exile- to the production of knowledge for approaching other similar processes in which the exiles appropriate their new environment as one of articulation between their memory (reconstruction of the past); their social and political praxis (intervention in the present) and their projects of returning (appropriation of the future). This investigation proposes to approach the resulting territoriality of the activation of new political and social spaces that the newly arrived establish with the host communities in a context of immediacy, uncertainty and transiency. It also aims to explain the process by which they are forced to rebuild their traditional identitary projects based in their space-territory of origin, as a way of creating new networks and spatialities, endowing the host territory with a sense of own future parallel to their project of return.