The Spanish Republican Exile: Identity, Belonging and Memory in the Digital World

Abstract

In recent years there has been an increasing number of websites dedicated to providing information about the Spanish Republican exile. These are generally created by exile descendants’ associations, research groups or private individuals. The recent growth of social networks, especially Twitter and Facebook, has simplified the exchange of this information and allowed the culture of the Republican exile to spread through the Internet and beyond, also influencing the scientific literature on this topic. This paper aims to analyse how the memory of the exile has grown through the Web with the passing of time and to examine the channels of communication that have become places of identity and belonging for the exiles, creating and enhancing a culture that permeates not only communities interested in the subject, but also people not directly linked to it. At the same time, it also aims to lay the foundations, for the first time, for the study of the memory of the exile in the digital domain. We start by recounting the burgeoning creation of websites and social media groups devoted to the republican exile, from 1998 to 2015, and link it with both contemporary Spanish political events and an in-depth look at recent Twitter activity. We then move to a fresh look at the digitised literature in Spanish on this topic present in the Google Books corpus, and finish by exploring the results from an online survey conducted in order to gain an insight into the motivations behind the increasing interest in the Spanish Republican Exile in contemporary global society.