When right-wing generals launched a coup attempt in Spain in July 1936, the U.S. left leaped into action.
Representatives of the ruling Republican forces toured the country to draw support. Communists and socialists quietly recruited military volunteers. And in Donora, Washington County, a small but active community of Spanish-born anarchists organized support clubs and raised hundreds of dollars for their comrades overseas.
Little is recorded in English about the largely vanished Spanish community in Donora, and even less about its politics. But radical newspapers, antifascist clubs and donation records offer a glimpse into a once-active movement there.
From Asturias to the Mon
Most of the Spanish migrants in the Monongahela valley evidently hailed from Asturias, a verdant mining region on Spain’s northern Atlantic coast. Speaking their own Romance language and keeping their own Celtic-influence culture, they settled where the familiar zinc industry was concentrated.
By the 1930s many had settled in Washington County — a center for zinc smelting — while others ended up in nearby regions of Ohio and West Virginia. The Asturians set up their own shops, cultural centers and sports teams (the “Donora Spanish” appear frequently in 1930s newspaper soccer reports).
One former resident recalled life there on a forum for Asturian-Americans:
They followed the zinc. Most of the Spaniards living in Donora lived between 10th Street and 15th Street, which put them within walking distance of the zinc works where they worked and close to the Spanish Club. Every summer we had a [huge] picnic at Palmer Park, which drew Spaniards from [Langeloth, Pa.], West Virginia and Canton, Ohio. There were a couple of Spanish owned markets, although they were small.
They quickly took to union activity. When zinc workers organized American Steel & Wire Corp., the U.S. Steel subsidiary in Donora, Spanish names featured prominently in the union. When the Steel Workers Organizing Committee struck in 1941, leaders included a Louis Busto and an Emilio Alvarez.
For some, they had likely already experienced the movement in Spain, where anarchists were a powerful force in labor.
Anarchists by nature
In Spain, the movement was centered on the National Confederation of Labor-Iberian Anarchist Federation, or CNT-FAI. The anarcho-syndicalist movement boasted mass membership and militancy; members joined a bloody miners’ uprising in Asturias in 1934, which led to the declaration of soviets and ended with brutal repression by the army.
Migrant workers brought their radicalism to the U.S., where they built an active Spanish-language anarchist press. The New York-based newspapers Cultura Obrera and Cultura Proletaria had subscribers scattered across small Appalachian towns, including near Pittsburgh.
A 1934 issue of Cultura Obrera lists subscribers in Donora and Langeloth, as well as in other areas like the West Virginia panhandle and rural Carbon County. Another identifies sympathizers in McKeesport. Even Scalp Level, near Johnstown, had subscribers.
In an interview with historian Paul Avrich for the book “Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America,” Spanish-born militant Marcelino Garcia — then living in retirement in central Pennsylvania — recalled the early movement.
Over the years many moved inland to the mines and factories of West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio, and took up their former occupations. They were an important element in steel, mining and metallurgy, as well as in cigarmaking. Of course not all Spaniards were anarchists, but even those who were not tended to be sympathizers. Spanish workers are by nature anarchists; Spaniards joined no other radical groups in any numbers in the U.S. At the height of the movement, during the 1920s and 1930s, there were about 2,500 active Spanish anarchists in the United States, as well as about 2,000 sympathizers. The top circulation of Cultura Proletaria, which I edited from the 1930s till it closed in 1952, was 4,000. But we were largely isolated. We had little contact with other anarchist groups, the biggest mistake we ever made in this country. We engaged mainly in propaganda — journals, lectures — and little participation in strikes. We were a small minority wherever we were.
The lack of mention of Spanish anarchists in the contemporary local press — despite its frequent fearmongering about radicals — underlines their isolation.
Radical countercultures
When war broke out in Spain between the Republican government and Francisco Franco’s nationalist troops, Spanish-Americans joined in the struggle. English-speaking anarchists formed a new alliance — the United Libertarian Organizations — and started a newspaper, Spanish Revolution (not to be confused with an identically named paper supporting dissident Marxists).
Alongside reports of social upheaval in Catalonia and updates from the front, Spanish Revolution published the names of those who donated for Spain’s anarchists. Among the early donors is a Manuel Garcia of Donora, who collected hundreds of dollars — the second-largest such gift after the Jewish Anarchist Federation. Other donations came from Ambridge, Beaver County; Moundsville, W. Va.; and Croatian and Slovenian workers’ societies in McKees Rocks.
Nationally, some 200 Spanish groups organized the Confederation of Hispanic Societies, a coalition dedicated to supporting the Republic against fascism. Professor and author Montse Feu’s book “Fighting Fascist Spain: Worker Protest from the Printing Press” details the U.S. effort to organize against Franco.
Feu’s book identifies three affiliated groups in Donora alone: the Frente Popular, the Sociedad Benéfica and the Socieded Popular Antifascista. She writes: “Many Spanish workers arrived in the United States already imbued with radical traditions rooted in the socialism or anarchism of their homeland . . . In the United States, they created their own alternative press and participated in vigorous transnational, radical countercultures.”
In an email, Feu said two Donora-based groups — the Compañeros de Donora and Sociedad Benéfica Española — were also members of International Antifascist Solidarity (SIA), a humanitarian aid alliance affiliated with anarcho-syndicalists in Spain. The group was active after the May Days, the period in 1937 when anarchists and their allies openly battled against the Communist- and socialist-controlled Spanish Republican government.
“Dying out”
It wasn’t just Spanish migrants who fought Franco locally. Many Pittsburghers joined the International Brigades or medical services to serve in Spain, including several from the Mon Valley. Franco triumphed in 1939, backed by Nazi Germany and fascist Italy.
Overseas aid groups continued for decades, with U.S. sympathizers publishing the newspaper España Libre until the 1970s.
Donora’s Spanish community dwindled after the 1950s. The zinc plant that employed nearly every Spanish man in town closed in 1957, as a Post-Gazette reporter noted:
For 30 years the Spanish Colony in Donora has held a Fiesta every July in Palmer Park. And that, old timers will tell you, meant people folk dancing in native costume to the music of the accordion and guitar by the light of paper lanterns strung from tree to tree. But the electric light has replaced the paper lantern, the phonograph has supplanted the accordion, and typical costume is Bermuda shorts. And now zinc smelting, which has been the way of life for generations for some of these people, seems to be disappearing, too.
The large Spanish club, complete with swimming pool, is closed but evidently still stands at the meeting of Meldon Avenue, McKean Avenue and 13th Street. There’s no indication of any surviving radical spaces (I haven’t been able to find addresses for any of the radical groups).
By the time he spoke with Avrich in 1971, Garcia — the Pennsylvania-based veteran anarchist — said little remained of the Spanish movement here.
“In America the movement is dead,” he said. Many comrades have died, and after the Second World War many moved to California. They too are dying out.”
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