Caciques and repression facing the secular model of the schools founded from America by the Galician emigration (1923-1936)

Abstract

Between the last part of the XIX century and the first decades of the XX, in a context of intense European emigration, hundreds of thousands of Galician men and women moved massively to diverse regions of America. Despite the harsh conditions of departure the new situation offered positive elements such as, among others, political awareness, its influence on the mutualist associationism and the ethnic solidarity in the place of origin by means of schooling projects intended for popular classes; in some cases, inspired on the modern educational reformist trends that advocated a lay and democratic school. This produced situations of conflict with the local conservative parties, deriving from persecution campaigns during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera (1923-1930) and a more intense repression from the military rebellion and during the period of the Spanish War (1936-1939). This work focusses on the labour of the societies of instruction, members of the Federation of Galician, Agricultural and Cultural Societies of Buenos Aires (Argentina).The consultation of diverse bibliographical newspaper press archives from that period enables us to reconstruct the scenario of persecution and repression in its area of influence, as an example of the perpetrated in general terms in other places in the rest of the country, and of which were victims the promotors of the schooling projects as well as their teachers, the pupils and their respective families.