The Spanish Anarchists of Northern Australia: Revolution in the Sugar Cane Fields

IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

The Spanish Anarchists of Northern Australia

Series Editors

Professor David George (Swansea University)

Professor Paul Garner (University of Leeds)

Editorial Board

David Frier (University of Leeds)

Lisa Shaw (University of Liverpool)

Gareth Walters (Swansea University)

Rob Stone (University of Birmingham)

David Gies (University of Virginia)

Catherine Davies (University of London)

Richard Cleminson (University of Leeds)

Duncan Wheeler (University of Leeds)

Jo Labanyi (New York University)

Roger Bartra (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México)

Other titles in the series

Paulo Emilio Salles Gomes: On Brazil and Global Cinema

Maite Conde and Stephanie Dennison

The Tlatelolco Massacre, Mexico 1968, and the Emotional Triangle of Anger, Grief and Shame: Discourses of Truth(s)

Victoria Carpenter

The Darkening Nation: Race, Neoliberalism and Crisis in Argentina

Ignacio Aguiló

Catalan Culture: Experimentation, creative imagination and the relationship with Spain

Lloyd Hughes Davies, J. B. Hall and D. Gareth Walters

Catalan Cartoons: A Cultural and Political History

Rhiannon McGlade

Revolutionaries, Rebels and Robbers: The Golden Age of Banditry in Mexico, Latin America and the Chicano American southwest, 1850–1950

Pascale Baker

Teresa Margolles and the Aesthetics of Death

Julia Banwell

Galicia, A Sentimental Nation

Helena Miguelez-Carballeira

IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

The Spanish Anarchists

of Northern Australia

Revolution in the Sugar Cane Fields

ROBERT MASON

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS

2018

© Robert Mason, 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3NS.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library CIP

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN     978-1-78683-308-2

e-ISBN  978-1-78683-310-5

The right of Robert Mason to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: Spanish labourers in 1907, imported to North Queensland plantations by the Colonial Sugar Refinery Company. By permission, Historic Collection / Alamy Stock Photo.

Contents

Series Editors’ Foreword

1  Introduction

2  Making Sense of Australia

3  In Search of Industrial Justice

4  Sugaring the Revolution

5  The Spanish Civil War

6  After the Civil War

7  Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Series Editors’ Foreword

Over recent decades the traditional ‘languages and literatures’ model in Spanish departments in universities in the United Kingdom has been superseded by a contextual, interdisciplinary and ‘area studies’ approach to the study of the culture, history, society and politics of the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds – categories that extend far beyond the confines of the Iberian Peninsula, not only in Latin America but also to Spanish-speaking and Lusophone Africa.

In response to these dynamic trends in research priorities and curriculum development, this series is designed to present both disciplinary and interdisciplinary research within the general field of Iberian and Latin American Studies, particularly studies that explore all aspects of Cultural Production (inter alia literature, film, music, dance, sport) in Spanish, Portuguese, Basque, Catalan, Galician and indigenous languages of Latin America. The series also aims to publish research in the History and Politics of the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds, at the level of both the region and the nation-state, as well as on Cultural Studies that explore the shifting terrains of gender, sexual, racial and postcolonial identities in those same regions.

1

Introduction

In 1901, the year in which the six Australian colonies federated to become one country, revolution was being plotted across the world. Even as wealthy white men consolidated means to protect their commercial, military and racial interests, networks of anarchists dreamed of their downfall. In imperial Russia, activists in St Petersburg drew on decades of struggle to advocate local control of economic and political decisions. In France, anarchists clashed with socialists over the latter’s plans for incremental change. In Italy, an anarchist had shot and killed the king less than six months earlier. Across the Atlantic, in the United States of America (USA), the legacies of the Haymarket Massacre in 1886 had been reinvigorated by the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901 at the hands of an anarchist agitator. Further south, in Argentina, anarchists sought to shift from such acts of propagandistic killing and instead use unions to push forward hopes for systemic change. Publicised in the newspapers and carried by migrants around the world’s ports, the anarchist movement appeared to be set for a long period of dominance as one of the world’s foremost historical forces.

In few places was this more evident than in Spain. In 1901, Spain continued to grapple with the loss of its Cuban and Philippine territories to the USA just three years earlier. The country’s major cities were undergoing unprecedented urbanisation as large sections of the countryside came under extreme population pressure. Spain’s political establishment lacked legitimacy outside the wealthy elite, and anarchists had gradually filled the vacuum, becoming integral parts of communities in the regions of Catalonia, Andalusia and elsewhere. As emigration from Spain increased in response to poverty and lack of opportunity, so too did the outward flow of hopeful workers sympathetic to anarchist ideals.

The flow of ideas was not solely European in origin. Spain’s former imperial possessions in the Asia–Pacific region were also part of the global debate about the evolution of democracy in the twentieth century. In the Philippines, José Rizal had long advocated Philippine independence, free from the competing influences of Spain, the Catholic Church and American imperialism. Philippine nationalists had immersed themselves in debates about self-government, individualism and anti-imperialism while in Europe. The Filipino nationalists were not alone in their desire for change in Asia and the Pacific. Others desperately hoped for more radical developments and carried their ideas in the ships that sailed the periphery of the Pacific Ocean, from Canada to Mexico, Chile, New Zealand, the Philippines and China.

The major ports of the Pacific Rim were alive to hopes of reform, led by anarchists and unionists working in unison to better their world. These dreams existed beyond the major trade routes, initially carried by migrant workers and often hidden or misunderstood by authorities. In Anglophone Australia, governments had long been alert to the threat of radicalised migrants. Irish Republicans had been a fixture of the establishment’s fears throughout the nineteenth century, and authorities watched events in Europe with disquiet. Over time, they would come to share trans-Atlantic worries about the power of radical organisations such as the One Big Union and the anarchist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Contrary to much public commentary at the time, these Australian groups were not solely English speaking, but were supported by many of the new country’s swelling numbers of non-British migrants. This book traces the forgotten lives of one particular group of such migrants: northern Australia’s Spanish anarchists.

Hidden from the view of Anglophone governments, Spanish anarchists nonetheless maintained their global connections in the fight to instil anarchism and secure justice for their communities. This monograph argues that the group enables new perspectives on the emotional and intellectual connections that migrants cultivated worldwide from their homes in Australia. Rather than focus solely on the region’s geographical isolation from Europe as a problem, the book suggests that the region’s isolation enabled new practices and new ways of imagining the world. These imaginings drew on Anglophone Australian norms, but were also fully immersed in radical critiques and the Spanish-speaking worlds of Europe and the Americas. Using Spanish-language archives alongside English-language sources, the book reveals the extent to which Australia can be thought of as being integrated in these worlds rather than distant and isolated from them.

Spain in the Pacific

Spain’s connection with Australia had begun with a rhetorical flourish of Catholic royalism that would have been utterly reprehensible to the anarchists of 1901. In 1606, Captain Pedro Fernandéz de Quirós had proclaimed that he took ‘possession of all this part of the South as far as the pole in the name of Jesus, which from now on will be called the Southern land Austrialia [sic] of the Holy Spirit’.¹ With these words, the explorer claimed the fabled Great Southern Land for the Hapsburg monarchs of Spain, and embedded the continent in their growing circle of imperial possessions in the Pacific Rim.

Regrettably for Quirós, he had made his proclamation not from Australia but from the island of Espíritu Santo in modern-day Vanuatu, several thousand kilometres from the Australian mainland. Nonetheless, he founded the fort of New Jerusalem in the hope of securing the region, and to defend himself from the hostile local population. As the fragile settlement collapsed and the limited extent of his discovery became clear, Quirós quickly returned home to Spain amid bitter recriminations and a failure to secure the Australian lands for the Spanish Crown.

The search for the southern continent was only part of the reason that the Spaniards were sailing through the region, and they had strict orders to continue to Manila if the new land was not found. Their presence had also been intended to consolidate knowledge of potential routes between Spain’s colonial territories in Latin America and those in the Philippines. Luís Váez de Torres took control of the Spaniards’ remaining two ships in Espíritu Santo, abandoning the fort and continuing to sail eastward and north. On his route, he sailed through the territories of today’s northern Australia, navigating the straits that now bear his name, and likely sighted the Australian mainland. By turning north for Manila, as his orders stipulated, Spain’s claim to have discovered anything more than the northern tip of Australia was left unpursued. The steady integration of the Pacific Rim into the Spanish world would nevertheless continue for centuries.

Europeans’ contact with Australia was haphazard until the eighteenth century, by which time the Spanish Empire had firmly established its imperial presence in the Pacific Rim. The territories of the viceroyalty of New Spain stretched from the coasts of contemporary California to Central America and west to include Guam and the Philippines. Two other Spanish viceroyalties controlled the entire western seaboard of South America. While Australia remained relatively untouched by Europeans’ presence, and other European and Asian powers jostled for influence, the Pacific Rim could now be described increasingly credibly as a ‘Spanish Lake’.²

Spain’s ability to project its authority varied tremendously across its Pacific possessions, with enormous differences between the coastal ports of Mexico and the rural islands of the Philippines. Contact between the various sections of the empire across the Pacific remained reliant on attenuated communication through shipping, and was mediated by a plethora of local authorities and conditions. While Manila became an important Asian centre from which Chinese goods could continue on to New Spain, it remained highly isolated from other Spanish territories. After a series of debilitating wars with the Dutch and English in the seventeenth century, Madrid made sustained efforts to consolidate and strengthen the Spanish presence in its west Pacific territories.

Spain’s presence in the western Pacific remained reliant on support from Mexico City, and there was relatively little direct contact between Madrid and its colonial subjects in the Philippines. Authorities there relied on an annual payment from New Spain to sustain its treasury, and administrators remained focused on providing for the territories’ defence. In the absence of a dynamic and empowered government able to lead in Manila, Catholic clergy became vital for the transmission of Spanish culture through their missionary work. Attempts to liberalise and broaden the reach of a cash economy were frequently blocked by hostile forces within the Church, so that Spain’s authority outside the main cities remained fragile. Given this, Spain’s authority in the Pacific remained far weaker than a map of Spanish territories would suggest.

The Spanish Empire was transformed by the Napoleonic Wars in the early nineteenth century. With the French invasion of Spain in 1806, the Bourbon monarch in Madrid was overthrown and Napoleon Bonaparte’s brother Joseph installed in his stead. The unintended effect was to accelerate moves to secure autonomy throughout Spain’s colonial territories of the Pacific Rim, as old patterns of loyalty were thrown open. Opinion on self-government was sharply divided across the various Spanish territories, but gradually shifted in favour of independence over a number of years. The defeat of the French, and the subsequent winding back of liberal reforms in Spain, accentuated social and political divisions across Spain and its overseas territories. Populations became polarised between Liberals and Conservatives, as political processes became captured by regional elites. Within the Pacific, almost all Latin American territories had secured their independence by 1825. The Philippines remained ruled by Spain, though, and continued to be highly dependent on contact with the now-independent Mexico. Despite these shifts, the trade and cultural sensibilities that had underpinned the empire remained a powerful source of collective solidarity.

As Spain’s former colonial domains in Latin America readjusted to their new-found freedom, an alternative transnational affiliation was emerging in the Pacific region. The USA had undergone a transformation in the mid-nineteenth century, following the annexation of the Republic of Texas in 1845 and the Mexican– American War of 1846–8. The collapse of the Mexican resistance in that war led many Americans to call for a sweeping appropriation of Mexican territories. The territories of Texas, New Mexico and California were relatively unproblematic to absorb, notwithstanding the very serious concerns that they would destabilise the precarious national debate about slave-owning states in the USA. As American troops occupied Mexico City, politicians in Washington worried about the implications of annexing additional territories that contained large numbers of Latino/a, Indigenous and mixed populations. They questioned whether their country’s Manifest Destiny could be extended to new regions that were populated with large numbers of free citizens, whom the majority of citizens in the USA did not view as white.

These debates continued long after the end of the war. Questions of whiteness and slavery remained at the centre of national life, and the USA was torn apart by the Civil War from 1861 to 1865. Notwithstanding the eventual abolition of slavery, the political elite and the social majority continued to view the nation as fundamentally white and Anglo–Saxon in culture. The 1898 Spanish–American War was viewed as an opportunity to expand American commercial and strategic interests in the Caribbean, but quickly expanded to encompass a conflict that stretched from Puerto Rico and Cuba to Guam and the Philippines. After successive victories against Spain, and despite already existing liberation movements in both Cuba and the Philippines, Washington moved swiftly to secure control of its new territories. The ejection of the Spanish forces and their replacement by Americans radically altered the balance of power in the Pacific Rim. It also transformed the racial debates about the imperial and emancipatory role of Europeans in the region. Anglophone Australians viewed the developments with delight, hopeful of increased security and cooperation between the white colonies of Australia and their Anglo–Saxon ally to the north.³

The impact of the Spanish–American War, and the loss of overseas territories, proved devastating in metropolitan Spain. Attempts had earlier been made to revitalise and consolidate Spain’s overseas provinces and colonies, through an emphasis on a transnational community of Spanish speakers imbued with centuries of continuous Spanish culture. Spain was already reeling from decades of ongoing insurrections and conflict between Liberal and Conservative forces, and the colonial defeats were taken as further proof of the country’s woes. The losses prompted a generation of debate about what direction Spain should choose for its future. Conservatives blamed the defeat on the loss of militant Catholicism and the decline in cultural unity, which they alleged had been caused by Spain’s industrialisation. Others felt that Spain had to embrace its future as a modern European power, and turn from the tortured legacies of its lost empire.

Following the defeats in 1898, there had been an initial impetus towards political and industrial modernisation, as new leaders sought to align Spain with a European model of development. Traditional elites rapidly reasserted control of the corrupt parliamentary system, however, and the sense of progress quickly dissipated. While the Catholic Church remained politically powerful, this influence rendered it increasingly vulnerable to criticism. Far from evangelising in the expanding cities, new urban areas were without places of Catholic worship and the Church’s social influence was gradually eroded. This crisis among the traditional elites was matched by a broader sense of malaise. Without important markets, especially in Cuba, demand dropped away and industrial centres such as Barcelona experienced economic and social crisis. Workers in these centres responded to their political exclusion and poverty with increasing frustration and violence.

Spain’s major industrial centres experienced a rapid growth in radical sentiment in the years following the Spanish–American War. This acceleration was aggravated by economic downturn, but drew on the long-standing influence of political thinkers whose work resonated across broad sections of society. Anarchism, in particular, had a powerful influence in Spain. Its appeal had grown in the second half of the nineteenth century, as workers sought a more democratic voice in how their communities were governed. Spain’s anarchists were not alone, and much of Europe debated the significance of anarchists’ acts of violence against leading politicians and statesmen, then known as ‘propaganda of the deed’. Across Europe, from Russia to Spain, anarchist thinkers and activists began to articulate an alternative vision of society. This new world would not be based on the needs of the few, and would not seek colonial adventures to distract the public and secure resources for the capitalist market. Instead, it would offer a vision of locally controlled political processes that genuinely sought to address the needs of the many.

Within Spain, as elsewhere, differences emerged between anarchist traditions. Over time, there was a decline in the emphasis on an individual who sought to raise public awareness by targeted acts of violence. Communities instead debated how to change the economic system through social action, so that politics and society would be transformed in its wake. Large aristocratic estates dominated in southern Spain, where landlords frequently enforced social and political control of their tenants. From the late nineteenth century, however, southern anarchists articulated a rural Utopian alternative that was dominated by a vision of land redistribution and autonomous communities. Anarchism developed differently in the expanding cities of the north, of which Barcelona became a major centre of activism. By the turn of the century, workers there confronted employers regarding control of industrial sites as workplaces emerged as the central organising principle by which a new world could be constructed.

Spain’s urban centres experienced a period of sustained growth from the late nineteenth century into the twentieth. The population increase in regions such as Andalusia caused pressure on land use, with the result that many peasants were displaced to squalid settlements on the fringe of