The return of first-generation republican exiles: a historical triangulation of Spanish refugees repatriating back to Spain (1936-2010)

Abstract

The Return Phenomenon of Spanish refugee exiles who repatriated back to Spain is a relatively new field under the history umbrella of the Spanish Civil War. It is developing and evolving into its own specific branching studies. However, the phenomenon as a whole still lacks a broader understanding of its diverse elements. Our approach has been fundamentally a methodologically driven one. Its hypotheses, questions, research, and conclusions are generated from work endeavoring to follow empirical research on social and subjective elements such as life trajectories, collective history, and migratory experiences; while structuring and codifying qualitative memories of what people have sustained in order to triangulate a common understanding through a mix-method approach analysis. We then extricated prevailing outlines of first-generation repatriates (therein known as Returnees), to tentatively ascribe them to the greater phenomenon. Guided by our thesis objectives, care was taken to separate the quantifiable from its qualifying data to then re-merge specific aspects of the research, which yielded the first four published articles of this thesis. There are two additional sections that were specifically written to meet our thesis objectives and whose early findings will later be submitted to peerreview journals. Structurally, we have first presented the guidelines for which we are presenting the thesis, and subsequently, an indexed quality of publications, qualifying the four publications.

El fenómeno del retorno de los refugiados-exiliados españoles a España, bajo el paraguas de la historia de la Guerra Civil española, es un campo relativamente nuevo que se está desarrollando y evolucionando cada vez más en estudios divididos. Sin embargo, todavía carece de una comprensión amplia por el hecho de ser tan complejo. En esta tesis, nos propusimos explorar una visión de conjunto, ampliar la definición y crear un punto de partida de dicho fenómeno mediante la triangulación específica de las similitudes y diferencias de una muestra de individuos de primera generación que regresaron tras un periodo de exilio, desde 1936 hasta 2010, y sus datos personales. Nuestro enfoque ha sido fundamentalmente una orientación metodológica. Sus hipótesis, preguntas, investigaciones y conclusiones se han generado a partir de un trabajo que intenta seguir la investigación empírica sobre elementos sociales y subjetivos como las trayectorias vitales, la historia colectiva y las experiencias migratorias; al tiempo que se estructuran y codifican las memorias de lo que las personas han sostenido.