Fighting Fascist Spain: Antifascist Humor Denouncing Francisco Franco’s Imperial Will

Before the Spanish Civil War, Latin America was already part of the colonial imaginary of Spanish fascists, and during the Franco dictatorship, the Consejo de Hispanidad promoted a new totalitarian order in the area through professional associations (Brydan 2019). In fact, the Rif War (1921-1927) was a catalyst for fascist Spain, as World War I was for German Nazism and Italian Fascism (Crumbaugh and Santiáñez 2020). Franco’s imperial concept of Hispanism proclaimed the universal task of assimilating the former colonies for the defense of Catholicism and the fascist Movimiento (Gallego 2017). The Spanish fascist identity was, in this respect, inseparable from the imperial one. Not only in Latin America, but also in the United States, Franco’s agents promoted a Fascist’s and imperial Spain (Chase 1943; Espasa 2017).

This chapter close reads farcical cartoons and chronicles published in U.S. Spanish periodicals from the 1930s to the 1960s that ridiculed the vehement imperial rhetoric of Franco’s propaganda and warned against the thread of fascism in the Americas. These humorous primary sources, which were an engaging way to disseminate antifascism, are curated in the digital humanities project Fighting Fascist Spain – The Exhibits, with the goal to preserve them and make them available to scholars and the general public via online collection and interpretative exhibits.