“The connections between the enemy at home and the enemy in Spain”: Langston Hughes’ black internationalism in the Spanish Civil War

ABSTRACT

From July to December 1937, Langston Hughes travelled to Spain to cover the Civil War as a correspondent. The five months he spent travelling throughout Spain gave rise to a prolific repertoire on which the author left a manifest ideological imprint. His observations from within and the ideological perspectives revealed the potential of travel writing as a tool to re-examine the local and international boundaries critically. This paper navigates Hughes’ dispatches in wartime Spain, which distanced him from traditional journalistic practices by demonstrating a clear preference for the ordinary, and a subjective interpretation of the events driven by an unambiguous ideological affiliation to the Loyalist faction. The analysis of the texts sheds light on how international travel facilitated Black connections and on the importance of travel to the politics of Black internationalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Langston Hughes
• Travel writing
• Spanish Civil War
• Race
• Black internationalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The use of this binomial in Hughes’ work is not limited to his repertoire on Spain. The author resorts to the imaginary of light and shadow in his earliest poetry to confront the experiences of oppression endured by the black race through shadows and the coping mechanisms associated with the resilient nature of the African American collective through light. A more detailed analysis of this play of opposites can be found on pp. 101–102 of Fernández-Alonso and Barros-del Río’s (2019) work.

2 Further page references of this frequently quoted volume will be given parenthetically in the text.

3 Pastora María Pavón Cruz, better known by her stage name, was one of the few artists who did not join the nationalist side and who remained faithful to her ideology. As Hughes (1956) points out, “she refused to leave the city she loved” (332).

4 Placing Hughes’ reporting style within the field of literary journalism highlights his role as a champion of oppressed societies, a storyteller of communities that tend to go unnoticed, and a mediator in the conception of a community’s symbolic image. Hughes’ profile as a literary journalist fits aptly with the characteristics of the African American press of the time, in showing a reality usually not covered by the American white print media, engaging in advocacy and, most importantly, employing subjectivity as a guiding principle. Hughes’ unabashed ideological affiliation to the Spanish Republic prevented him from portraying an objective reporting on the civil conflict.

5 In I Wonder as I Wander, Hughes (1956) attributes this quote to Federico García Lorca (387).

6 In The Big Sea, Hughes (1993) describes how he fell a victim to this social stigma. Working in Toluca (Mexico) as a teacher, one of his white American classmates is surprised to find an African American teaching. “At the end of the first day, she said: ‘Ah never come across an educated Ne-gro before’ […] I said: ‘They have a large state college for colored people in Arkansas, so there must be some educated ones there’. She said: ‘Ah, reckon so, but Ah just never saw one before’” (79).

7 “Madrid, how well you resist the bombardments! The people of Madrid laugh at the bombs!” (own translation).

8 The figure of the war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War has been amply studied and recognised (Deacon 2008; Preston 2009; Hochschild 2016, among others). The rise of fascism in Europe and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War stimulated the rise of a generation of intellectual writers who acquired a commitment and an active social attitude “responding to the rise of totalitarianism, violence, persecutions, and ideological conflicts” (Mascaro 2018, 176).

9 Like most of the minority press, the African American was focused on the everyday and focused on covering events ignored by the more popular press, mainly news related to the activities and achievements of the collective (Wallace 2005). Coverage of this type of content, sometimes labelled “literary populism” (Roiland 2013, 20), allowed black readers to link their concerns at the local level to issues affecting communities globally.

10 Valentín González, better known by his nickname El Campesino, was a communist military man appointed general of militias in the republican army.

11 This passage connects with Hughes’ account (1993) in The Big Sea of his first voyage to Africa on a merchant ship in 1923, when the Africans of Liberia call him white and are surprised, but in reverse, by the lightness of his skin tone.

12 On this topic, Blackburn’s (1998) work is worth mentioning. The scholar situates Spain in the history of the African diaspora and highlights its pioneering role in slavery and the development of the concept of race, asserting that the North American colonists “were very much aware of the Spanish practice of African slavery” (156).

13 Part of Hughes’ literary inclination towards the Roma people and their aesthetic draws from the influence of Lorca’s work, an author who, as Aguasaco (2018) points out, was considered “the central link through which many American artists and intellectuals would articulate their vision of Spain in the twentieth century” (13).