Silenced for almost half a century, testimonies of those who lost the Spanish Civil
War are now surfacing and being published. The origin of this dissertation was the
chance discovery that Martín Herrera de Mendoza, a Spanish Civil War exile living in the
United States, was truly a Catalonian anarchist named Antonio Vidal Arabí. This double
identity was a cover for the political activist dedicated to the fight for change in the
anarchist workers’ union CNT (National Confederation of Workers) and the FAI
(Federation of Iberian Anarchists). He founded the FAI chapter in Santa Cruz de Tenerife
and planned a failed assassination attempt on General Franco’s life in an effort to avoid
the military takeover in 1936.
This dissertation is the reconstruction of Antonio Vidal Arabí’s life narrative. It is
based on the texts written during his seventeen-month stay as a refugee in Great Britain.
Copies of his writings were left in a suitcase with a fellow anarchist who he instructed to
have sent to his family upon his death. In 1989, “The English Suitcase” was delivered to his children in Barcelona. Based on his own account, this study follows his service as an
intelligence agent for the Spanish Republic during the War. When it was over, he
attempted to evacuate his family from France, to save them from the threat of the Nazi
invasion and reunite with them in England or America.
The analysis of the letters he wrote to his wife and children in France documents
how he hid from Franco’s spies using his dual identity. In his letters, always signed as
Martín Herrera de Mendoza, he invents a persona in order to help his family. The present
study narrates his transformation into the persona he created and the events that brought
about his translation into his “other.” Antonio Vidal Arabí’s bilinguism and biculturality
is underlined as the main factors in his change into Martín Herrera de Mendoza. His was
a voyage into exile documented by his own words; a story of survival and reinvention. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2017. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fau.edu/oai:fau.digital.flvc.org:fau_34568 |
| Contributors | Martin, Angela F. (author), Erro-Peralta, Nora (Thesis advisor), Florida Atlantic University (Degree grantor), Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters, Department of Languages, Linguistics and Comparative Literature |
| Publisher | Florida Atlantic University |
| Source Sets | Florida Atlantic University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation, Text |
| Format | 351 p., application/pdf |
| Rights | Copyright © is held by the author, with permission granted to Florida Atlantic University to digitize, archive and distribute this item for non-profit research and educational purposes. Any reuse of this item in excess of fair use or other copyright exemptions requires permission of the copyright holder., http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
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