Letters in cursive Catalan, colorful cartoons, feminist magazines, propaganda posters that call for women to “smash” fascism.
These objects, all nearly a century old, are part of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library’s extensive Spanish Civil War collections — and, one recent morning, were carefully handled and examined by undergraduate students enrolled in the fall semester course “Revolutionary Barcelona.”
Barcelona has long been a “locus of revolution,” explained Aurélie Vialette, the course instructor and a professor of Spanish and Portuguese in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The anarchist movement blossomed there two centuries ago; today, the city is at the heart of the ongoing movement for Catalan independence. Her class, taught in Spanish, traced these practices of political resistance all the way from the early 19th century to the Spanish Civil War.
Vialette with students.
Rather than relying on online sources or textbooks, Vialette wanted to investigate this rich history through a research-based, haptic approach — one that prioritized everyday experiences over grand events. Over a semester, her students sifted through the archives, piecing together clues about how ordinary citizens lived during a period of political violence.
“We usually study history in books or articles, and they’re about these great battles, generals, politicians,” said Vialette. “But at the Beinecke, you have [the] objects of people who are not in the history books. They tell us about the way people were living during the war — their hardships, but also their everyday lives.”
Vialette also gave her students another chance to engage with history hands-on — by arranging a surprise class trip to Barcelona.
Living history in Barcelona
Vialette organized the fall break trip after students had already registered for the class; it was funded fully by the MacMillan Center’s Course Travel Abroad grant, with additional support from Yale’s Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration. It was a vivid way to show her students how Barcelona’s waves of political resistance have built — and still shape — the city, Vialette said.
“Working in archives and discussing readings, but also going to Barcelona and meeting with various professors there… There’s been many different avenues to approach the central questions [of our class],” said Kyle Thomas Ramos, a senior majoring in Political Science.
Kyle Thomas Ramos examines a children’s book, written in Catalan, that was published during the Spanish Civil War.
The trip brought up another, contemporary issue: overtourism. “There’s a strong resistance movement to mass tourism,” said Vialette. “I wanted students to be sensitive to the fact that when you go to Barcelona, your imprint as a tourist has an impact on other people’s lives.”
Additionally, Vialette aimed to complicate her students’ view of Barcelona by showing them a side of the city’s history few tourists learn about.
“One of my goals in this class has been to talk about things that might be uncomfortable, but that are so important to understand Spanish history,” Vialette said. “The legacy of slavery is one of them.”
Students took a guided tour of Barcelona — led by Oriol López Badell through the Spanish NGO Associació Coneixer Història — that focused on how the city’s statues, plazas, and other monuments, including the famed cathedral Sagrada Família, were built with money invested in Barcelona from the slave trade and plantations in Cuba during the 19th century. The other experiences Vialette prepared for her class included a concert of the songs of Revolutionary Barcelona, with Antoni Rossell Mayo, and a photojournalism tour that retraced what a photographer would have experienced in the streets during a Spanish Civil War battle (led by Ricard Martínez).
The trip brought Vialette’s class closer — and in the process, enriched their learning.
“Our trip to Barcelona was awesome,” said Katy Scott, a Yale sophomore from Massachusetts. “It was fun to feel close to everyone in the class. It just makes learning… [and] showing up to class every day much more enjoyable. We’re very comfortable with each other.”
Ricard Martínez, left, led Vialette’s class on a photojournalism tour through Barcelona.
Piecing together archival clues
For their final projects, students each wrote an essay centered on their work in the Beinecke’s Spanish Civil War archives, assembled by Jana Krentz, the librarian for Latin American, Iberian & Latinx Studies. Along the way, students became expert researchers, learning to piece together visual and textual clues in artifacts that were often hard to interpret, whether due to a person’s handwriting or a lack of text.
“I’d never come to the Beinecke before this class,” said Sarah Ramos-Gonzalez, a sophomore double majoring in ethnicity, race, and migration and Spanish. “It just makes me think about how great of an access to unique archives and sources we have here at Yale.”
The papers of Joan Alzina, a Catalan soldier who served in the Spanish Civil War’s Republican Army, include letter drafts addressed to his family members.
Many of the documents were written in Catalan, a Romance language tied to Catalonian identity that Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, installed after the Spanish Civil War, sought to erase for much of the 20th century.
Deciphering this new language took persistence, said Ramos-Gonzalez, who read the correspondence between a Republican soldier and his little sister. In the margins of one letter, the soldier drew Mickey Mouse with a bayonet, an image that offered an example of how ideology permeated everyday life during the war, Ramos-Gonzalez said — but also how citizens used art to live on.
Catalina Mahe, a senior studying Global Affairs, examined postcards sent by Spanish refugees from evacuation camps on the border of France — one of several countries that took in refugees of the Spanish Civil War, in what Mahe called a display of “international cooperation and solidarity against fascism.”
Catalina Mahe sorts through photos of refugees from the Spanish Civil War.
“Seeing these visual stories of suffering made it much more real. It gave me more compassion for their experiences,” Mahe said.
Access to a fuller understanding of the people and places they were studying, Vialette said, was what she’d hoped to achieve with this hands-on work with the “treasures” of the Beinecke. “When you see these historical objects on the screen or in a book, that’s fine,” she said. “But if you can see them in person, you realize their amplitude. That makes a difference.”
