Women's profiles: first generation of Spanish civil war Republican exiles who returned to Spain

Abstract

The Spanish Civil War displaced half a million people outside of Spain and exiled more than two hundred thousands across the world, concentrating them into refugee communities in France, Mexico, Argentina and the Soviet Union, among others. In the field of Spanish diaspora studies, much of the research has focused on the exiled acculturation experience, and to a lesser degree, the repatriation back to Spain. Exceedingly, the gender-based research has focused on the individual woman and her specific narrative. We endeavored to broaden this by categorizing the women’s repatriation experience through grouping them by their country of exile and comparing their collective returns. We created two databases, the first contained exile individuals found in literary mediums, while the second was generated via an online questionnaire, filled out by descendants of exiles. In total, we aggregated 100 women; 83 in the former and 17 in the latter database. We selected the top four countries of exile, accounting for 80% of individuals, and analyzed the migratory and social-political data points. We concluded that the French and Mexican profiles were more representative of their historic exile populations than the Soviet Union and Argentinian ones.