Exile, a global and protean phenomenon, touched about half million Spanish Republican refugees at the end of the 1936-39 War in Spain. Contrary to Mexico’s significant sheltering, the USA mainly admitted a select group of intellectuals: notably, Zenobia Camprubí and her partner, the 1956 Nobel Prize for Literature recipient, Juan Ramón Jiménez, University of Maryland (1943-1951), Pedro Salinas (Johns Hopkins Univ.), or women like Carmen Aldecoa, or Carmen de Zulueta, who kept alive the progressive gender and education claims from the Second Spanish Republic (1931-1939) at other schools and universities.

Nevertheless, widely supported relief organizations and leftist publications channeled aid for the exiles, and rose antifascist awareness for US intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky. Contributions herein this volume, generated eighty years later at the University of Maryland during an international symposium (2019), throughout a continuing academic interest for this diaspora, will illuminate readers on the depth of Spanish exile studies in the Americas, and some lasting contributions from this significant group of witnesses.

José María Naharro-Calderón is Professor of Iberian Literatures, Cultures and Exile Studies at the University of Maryland. He has been a pioneer mapping itineraries from key Spanish 1939 exiles and milestones: Celso Amieva, Max Aub, María Luisa Elío, Juan Ramón Jiménez, concentration camps… He is the president of the Asociación para el Estudio de los Exilios y las Migraciones Ibéricas Contemporáneas [AEMIC] (2016-2024). For the past 20 years he has coordinated the Summer Seminar in Llanes (Asturias) “Diásporas y Fronteras”.