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Title: Remembering Federico Arcos Author: David Watson Date: November 30, 2015 Language: en Topics: Spanish Revolution, Federico Arcos, Remembrance, David Watson, Fifth Estate Source: https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/395-winter-2016-50th-anniversary/remembering-federico-arcos/ Notes: This article, along with additional material is available on the Fifth Estate site at http://www.fifthestate.org/archive/395-winter-2016/remembering-federico-arcos/
Federico Arcos (July 18, 1920-May 23, 2015), a lifelong anarchist,
participated in the Spanish Revolution and Civil War in the 1930s, and
later took part in the antifascist underground there. He immigrated to
Canada in 1952, where he continued his commitment to anarchist goals. He
eventually compiled an extensive archive of anarchist writings and other
material.
Fifth Estaters met Federico in the early 1970s. In time he became a
beloved elder to people working on the paper, and in the larger
Detroit/Windsor anarchist, radical, and labor communities. The 50th
anniversary retrospective exhibit of the FE at Detroit's Museum of
Contemporary Art is dedicated to Federico. It runs from September 2015
to January 2016.
The following remembrance is presented with the understanding that each
generation of rebels confronts the leviathan of oppression and
exploitation in its own way, using the ideas and resources passed on to
it by those who came before. Today's anarchists and anti-authoritarians
fight for a future free from hierarchy and exploitation, developing
means and strategies as they go. For some, living memory of the struggle
goes back to the Occupy movement, for others, Seattle in 1999. Those of
us who became active in the 1960s and '70s were personally acquainted
with veterans of the revolts earlier in the century, from whom we drew
deep inspiration and courage. Because the fight for freedom is still
ongoing, awareness of the lives and legacies of yesterday's fighters and
battles remains relevant, in fact essential.
âRobby Barnes
We have gathered here today to remember and to celebrate our dear friend
Federico ArcosâFede, as many of his friends knew him. Yesterday, July
18, was his ninety-fifth birthday. It was also the anniversary of the
military putsch in Spain in July 1936 that sparked the response of the
poor and working classes of Barcelona, and other parts of Spain, which
became the Spanish Revolution.
For many years a community of friends, comrades, and admirers of
Federico gathered around this time of year to wish him well, to toast
and roast him, and to affirm the anarchist and humanist ideals he
espoused. So, here we are, gathered once more to celebrate and honor
him, to celebrate and honor the ideals of freedom, solidarity, and love.
And so, a toast to Fede, nuestro amigo, hermano, compañero, padre,
abuelo, y yayo. If you donât have anything to drink, raise your arms in
the old anarchist salute, with a clenched fist and the other hand
clasping the wrist, a gesture he often made from his porch, tears in his
eyes, when we drove away from his house. ÂĄViva! [TOAST]
When some of us on this side of the river met Federico back in the
early-mid 1970s, he really did not drink at all, or almost not at all.
He was very serious, and a little puritanical in the style of many of
the old anarchists, eschewing cigarettes, alcohol, and earthy language.
He could be pretty judgmental about such matters. But over the years he
loosened up, and would take a small glass of wine for the toast. He also
became looser and earthier in his language when we spoke, and funnier.
Federico was a dedicated comrade; he disapproved of so-called Latin
time, and usually arrived early to work on projects or to visit friends.
He never suggested putting something off that could be accomplished
immediately. But he was funny, and fun-loving, and sometimes erudite. He
always, as long as we knew him, regaled us with a profusion of proverbs,
expressions, tongue-twisters in Spanish and Catalan, poems, and jokes
(some a little more ribald as time went on). He believed in the power of
the word, and he would recite reams of poems from memoryâsome of it
nineteenth century, over-baked romanticism, true, but wonderful to hear
from him. He spoke French, Italian, Catalan, Spanish, English and
serviceable Portuguese, and at one time could âdefend himselfâ in
Arabic, as they put it in Spanish. He was moved to tears by great music,
poetry, art, and by stories of human courage, altruism, and
sufferingâand by his memories.
He usually became very emotional reciting poems and reflecting on his
life. This was not simply a question of old age, though it did become
more pronounced over time. His old friend and fellow Quijote del Ideal,
Diego Camacho, once told me that Federico was âalways a bit of a
crybaby, a llorĂłn,â a well-known romĂĄntico who cried easily, even as a
young man, when moved by lifeâs pain or its beauty.
In such moments, remembering his fallen friends, Federico would insist
that everything meaningful to himâwho he was and had become, his
adherence to his principles, his hope in the futureâhe owed to them. And
he would add that he also owed it us, his community, his compañeros now.
He meant the radical and anarchist community here, but also he meant the
people in the union and on projects with whom he collaborated in
Windsor.
To us, Federico seemed to have washed up on the shores of this Strait
from some terrible shipwreck, the destruction of a world and vision that
briefly flourished and might have still been, but for the evil men do.
But his energy, his hope, and his memories of that dream had an effect
on all who came to know him. In his biography of Emma Goldman, Rebel in
Paradise, our friend Richard Drinnon quoted Goldmanâs often repeated
observation, âIf you do not feel a thing, you will never guess its
meaning.â Federicoâs deep feeling connected him, and helped to connect
us, and he came to embody in his humble way almost everything that
really mattered to us as well.
Before you start to think that I am immortalizing him, let me say that
Federico was a humble man, simple in some ways but also complicated. He
was imperfect. Like all of us, he had his moments of vanity and of ire.
He was proud of his contributions, and could be vain about them as he
got older. He could be petulant with friends and others about
differences of opinion, and he was at times a tyrannical father when his
daughter did not follow in his footsteps to fight for el Ideal.
But usually the vanity came from an understandable pride in largely if
not entirely having resisted the bribery of modern society and its array
of commodities and consumption, and in having contributed to the
struggle for human freedom in ways that he would remind you were modest.
He always insisted that he was ânot good enoughâ to be a revolutionary
or an anarchist because, as he expressed it once in âLetter to a
Friend,â an essay published in the Fifth Estate, for one to claim such a
designation, âit would be necessary to reach the extreme point of
sacrifice and to devote oneself without reservation to doing good,
without limit and without cease.â
One may be tempted to see this as more romanticismo, but in fact he
fought in a revolution and saw it defeated, and the inevitable human
suffering and despair that followed, and he lived with the fact, never
forgot the fact, that several of his closest friends and compañeros in
the revolution and later the anti-Franco underground died in the war and
its aftermath. He remembered José Gosalves, a young Quijote who died of
illness in the internment camp in France. And José Sabaté and Francisco
MartĂnez, killed by Francoâs cops. And JosĂ© Pons and JosĂ© PĂ©rez Pedrero,
captured and executed in Francoâs prisons. And there was the
incandescent RaĂșl Carballeiraâwhom he may have loved most of all, and
for whom he penned a poetic eulogy in his book Momentosâwho, in 1948, at
thirty years old, cornered by the police in Barcelona and wounded in a
shoot-out, chose to take his own life rather than surrender. There was
romanticism in Federicoâs refusal to call himself a revolutionary, yes,
and in his tears for his fallen friends, for a dream destroyed, but it
was not mere romanticismâthere was authentic historical experience, and
spirit and humanity and truth in it.
And he could be excessively judgmental, but his wrath was often directed
at a failure he perceived in people, then and today, to forget the most
important truths of lifeâthat, as one of his heroes, Lev Tolstoy, put
it, that âthe supreme law of life is love,â and as another, Emma
Goldman, put it, that âLife without an ideal is spiritual death.â He was
fond of quoting both. His orientation was always existential and
ethical. He never succumbed to spiritual death. He was always being
renewed by El Ideal, forever being born, until the end. And he never
lost hope in the possibility of human freedom and solidarity. In an
interview with Pacific Street Films in 2003, he said, âMaybe humankind
will never reach true freedom, but as long as one single human being is
dreaming for freedom, and fighting for it, there will be hope. Thatâs
the thing that keeps me alive.â (See
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHHchKNfgM4.)
---
Born in Barcelona in 1920 in an anarchist immigrant family that had come
to the city from the Castilian hinterland to work, Federico grew up in
the heavily anarchist, working class Barcelona district of Clot, a
barrio that has continued in its own way to represent the famous
Barcelona rebelde, even recently, in the last few years of asambleas
(community assemblies) and the indignados, who played a role in
inspiring our Occupy movement. He had two brothers and two sisters, all
older, who had been born in the village of Uclés, in Cuenca province.
Federico was able to visit the village in 1988; he told historian Paul
Avrich in an interview for the book, Anarchist Voices, that at the end
of the Civil War, Uclés, where a Republican hospital had been located,
fell to Francoâs troops and was converted into a concentration camp. The
mass grave of the starved and murdered prisoners is still there.
Federicoâs father, Santos Arcos SĂĄnchez, and his mother, Manuela
MartĂnez Moreno, had been peasants; his father was illiterate, and his
mother could read and write only a little. Federico learned to read
across the street from his home at the Academia Enciclopédica, one of
the anarchist free thought schools that provided a broader educational
experience than the vast majority of schools available in Spain at the
time, most of which were sponsored by the Catholic Church. One of his
earliest memories was reading the workersâ newspapers to his father and
other neighbors when they gathered in their doorways to socialize at the
end of the day. He left school at thirteen and started working as a
cabinetmaker, becoming an apprentice at fourteen. He later went to trade
school and became a skilled mechanic, working on lathes, drills,
cutters, shapersâhe would continue to work in this field throughout his
life. At fourteen, he also joined the ConfederaciĂłn Nacional de Trabajo
(CNT), the anarchist union. His father, brothers, and brother-in-law
were all CNT members.
Federico often talked with great emotion about the working class
community in which he was formed. In an interview for the 1997 film
Vivir la utopia (Living Utopia), he recalled: âNeighbors made up one big
family. In those days there was no unemployment benefit, no sickness
benefit or anything like that. Whenever someone was taken sick, the
first thing a neighbor with a little spare cash did was to leave it on
the table ⊠There were no papers to be signed, no shaking of hands ⊠And
it was repaid, peseta by peseta, when he was working again. It was a
matter of principle, a moral obligation.â Thus to us Federico served not
only as a link to the glory days of the revolution, but also to that
older village society of solidarity and mutual aid, to the community
described by Kropotkin, the soil in which the revolutionary
communitarian ethos came to life.
In 1936, the people of Barcelona rose up spontaneously and quickly put
down the fascist coup locally. There were some skirmishes with a handful
of pro-Franco rebels, some bombs were thrown, the workers began to take
over industry and run the city, and brigades to defend the city were
formed. In Vivir la utopia, Federico recalled: âIt was as if the whole
of Barcelona was pulsing to a single heartbeat, the sort of thing that
only happens maybe once in a century ⊠And, if I may say so, it has left
its mark on my life and I can still feel that emotion.â Federico joined
the Juventudes Libertarias of Catalonia and volunteered to fight (at
first he was not taken because of his age). He recalled that when he saw
anarchists burning money, he decided to save a few pesetas to show his
children so that he could tell them, âThink of it, people used to kill
one another for money!â He had just turned sixteen years old. He and
other youths formed a group, Los Quijotes del Ideal (the Quixotes of the
Ideal), named after literatureâs greatest idealist, and began publishing
El Quijote, which was censored by the Republican government for its
stubborn anarchist positions. He and other young people were critical of
the CNT for joining the government; they admired the Durruti Column,
where everyone including Durruti received the same pay and officers were
elected.
In April 1938 Federico was sent to the front near Andorra, along with
his brother-in-law and mentor Juan Giné. Durruti was dead, and things
were moving in the other direction, but Federico did not turn his back
on the struggle. He recalled that when he got to the front, he ran into
an old friend who had no shoes, and he gave him his second pair of
alpargatas, the cheap cloth slippers worn by the poor. He was appointed
a miliciano cultural, and he found a blackboard and an illustrated
two-volume set of Don Quixote, and used both to teach the troops to read
and write. He was issued a rifle and bayonet, did night watch, and slept
in his uniform. âMice chewed away at my pants,â he told Avrich, adding
that the Republican armyâs âequipment and clothing left much to be
desired.â
I think of that gift of a pair of alpargatas, the salvaged blackboard
and beautiful edition of the Quixote, and of the mice chewing at his
clothing like the mice in the cell of Diogenes, as illustrative of the
struggle of culture and life against terrible inhumanity. Federico
carried that worldâthe great suffering (el dolor), but also the
fraternity and beautyâin him. He imparted that world to us by his
witness and his warmth.
In November 1938 Federico was deployed to Tortosa, a once beautiful town
that lay in ruins on the lower Ebro River, southwest of Tarragona and
Barcelona. The fascists were winning the battle. Food was scarce, though
there were oranges from the groves around the town. Soon, Republican
forces were overwhelmed by Francoâs troops, and retreated in disarray to
Tarragona. Then Tarragona fell. It was a rout, with planes strafing the
fleeing columns; the deadâmen, horses, and mulesâlay scattered along the
road. âMy comrades were dying all around me,â he recalled. He himself
was wounded slightly by a piece of shrapnel. (Some of the story of the
collapse of the Republican front, the fall of Tarragona and Barcelona,
and the flight to France is told in Avrichâs Anarchist Voices, and more
detail is given in the Spanish edition, translated by Antonia Ruiz
Cabezas, Federicoâs good friend and ours.)
In February 1939 Federico and some of his close compañeros made their
way out of Spain and into France in a harrowing passage through the
mountains. They were sent to a series of refugee camps, where people
made the best of their situation, organizing cultural events and
creating a school where they taught each other French, math (both of
which served him later), and other subjects. His closest Quijote
buddiesâGerminal Gracia, Liberto Sarrau, Diego Camacho, RaĂșl
Carballeiraâmade their way there, too. In the Spanish edition he says of
that time in the camp, âWe formed a true community, united by the Ideal
and love. Those moments make up part of something very intense that
endures across the years.â
Federico left the camp in November 1939 to work for a time in an
aviation factory in Toulouse, until the defeat of France in June 1940,
when he returned to the camp at ArgelĂšs. In 1941 he escaped from the
camp; the Vichy government was deporting the Spanish refugees to slave
labor camps in Germany, where thousands would die, and by 1942 German
troops were directly in charge of the area, seizing and deporting people
to the camps. He hid in Toulouse, working in a factory for a sympathetic
employer. By 1943, things had become so dangerous that he and others
decided to return to Spain, which was calling on exiles to return and
report for military service. Upon his return, he was jailed and then
pressed into military service, and sent to Morocco, to Ceuta and the
same barracks his father and brother had been sent earlier. He remained
there for two years.
Federico was lucky in Morocco. He learned some Arabic and he read a lot.
Once, after he told the commander he wouldnât go to church or take
communion, the man did him a good turn, assigning him to guard duty on
Sunday mornings and later offering him a post at a checkpoint in the
mountains, away from the barracks, and where it was quiet and the air
was clear. He thought Federico the best man for the job because they
needed someone at the checkpoint who would not be afraid to demand that
military officers follow the checkpoint protocols like everyone else.
Federicoâs defiance thus worked for him. He also liked to tell a story
about how the portrait of Franco that hung in the barracks kept
mysteriously disappearing, to the consternation of the commander. They
could never catch anyone, and eventually they stopped hanging it in
there.
In 1945, he was released from the army and returned to Barcelona, where
he reunited with some of his old comrades, and started working with the
underground, including working on the clandestine paper. He left for
France in 1948 after the death of RaĂșl Carballeira, later crossing back
into Spain with other militants and robbing a factory in the Pyrenees to
turn the funds over to the movement. He was nearly captured, and almost
froze to death in the mountains, before returning to Toulouse.
His close friends Liberto Sarrau, Diego Camacho, and Germinal Gracia
were eventually all arrested. Diego, who had been pressed into forced
labor by the Nazis in France, eventually worked with the French
resistance and then the Spanish underground. He was arrested and
imprisoned twice, from 1942-1947 and then almost immediately after being
freed, from 1947-1952. He took shelter in France until 1977, after the
death of Franco. As Abel Paz, he authored many books on anarchism and
other subjects; he died in Barcelona in 2009. Liberto was arrested in
1948 and sentenced to twenty years, but was released after ten. He moved
to France and remained active until his death in 2002. Germinal, who
used the pseudonym VĂctor GarcĂa, who had already escaped from a cattle
truck transporting Spanish prisoners to Dachau in 1944, managed to get
out of jail using false identity papers after being arrested in 1946,
and after a shoot-out with police later fled to France. In 1948 he went
to Venezuela, where he edited the anarchist publication Ruta, and also
from where he traveled all over the world, earning the title âEl Marco
Polo del Anarquismo.â He died in France in 1991.
Federico stayed in close contact with them allâtheir friendship was deep
and unwavering. These men, and so many other men and women of the
anarchist community, were remarkable, admirable human beings. We
consider ourselves to be extraordinarily fortunate to know of them and
to have gotten to know some of them.
---
In 1952 Federico immigrated to Canada and began working at a Ford auto
plant in Windsor as a skilled mechanic. In 1958 he became a Canadian
citizen and was also reunited with his companion, Pura PĂ©rez, who had
been in the group Mujeres Libres (Free Women), and who came with their
daughter Montse to Windsor. Federico worked much of his life at Ford,
and was a militant rank-and-file union member, participating in the
historic 110-day Canadian Auto Workers strike in Windsor in 1955. He
brought his experience and his broad understanding to the factory floor,
union hall, and community. He was highly respected not only for the
ideals he espoused but for his cosmopolitan humanity, his day-to-day
principles, his commitment to and hard work for his fellow workers. He
was also known to point out, with a certain ferocity, that the union was
a human institution built to provide mutual aid to the workers and to
advance the cause of an international that would be the human race, not
a business guild created to carve out a bigger piece of a pie based on
the assumed cynicism and corruption of all. Similarly, he was quick to
remind the uninformed or the mendacious, which he did on multiple
occasions at meetings and conferences on the history of the Spanish war,
that Spain first had a Revolution, and then a Civil War, and that many
of the purported good guys in the Hemingway legend and related Civil War
tales were not as good as they were made out to be.
After he retired from Ford in 1986, Federico became a committed
volunteer with the Occupational Health Clinic for Ontario Workers and
the Windsor Occupational Health Information Service for more than twenty
years, collecting information and educating workers on the dangers of
industrial chemicals to workers and the larger community. With these
organizations, he also used his Spanish as a volunteer to help Mexican
migrant workers on Ontario farms. As with his CAW work, he proved that
he could overcome ideological differences for some greater good, working
pragmatically for the sake of people in need with people who did not
necessarily share his anarchist ideas, even, God forbid, with a man who,
he told me, was a Catholic priest, but nevertheless a good man and a
real human being. Some of our anarchist friends in Spain have joked with
us about the older generation, that âSe les pararon los relojes al
cruzar el RĂo Ebroâ (Their watches stopped when they crossed the Ebro
River), but in Federicoâs case this was not true; the old truths lived
on in him, but he was able to allow them to evolve with his experience
as life went on. For this reason, too, he was a voice of
reasonâunsuccessfully, it turned outâwhen the Spanish CNT imploded due
to sectarian in-fighting and political gangsterism.
During his time in Windsor, Federico also found what remained of a
vibrant anarchist community across the river in DetroitâSpaniards,
Eastern Europeans, and Italiansâpeople we would eventually meet through
him. In the 1970s he met Fredy and Lorraine Perlman, became a supporter
of and collaborator on their publishing project, Black and Red, and met
us at the Fifth Estate, becoming an active supporter and volunteer.
Federico had been one of the youngest members of the European immigrant
anarchist community. After he found us, he gradually became one of our
most cherished elders, our abuelo, our yayo.
When we met him he was already putting together what became one of the
foremost anarchist archives in North America, indeed, in the world, in
his modest Windsor home. Many scholars, most of them sympathetic to
anarchism, would go to the Labadie Library at the University of Michigan
to do research, and then cross the river to visit him, and do their
research there in his archive in the basement. He is thanked in numerous
books, articles, and blogs by historians and radical activists who came
to work there or simply to meet him and his compañera, Pura. Visitors
were always welcomed and fed in the typically gracious Iberian style,
often with a delicious paella he would tell you was Catalan, and Pura
would tell you was Valencian. We, too, spent many fascinating and
pleasant afternoons around their table. We appreciated his romanticismo,
and also how she tempered it with some biting commentary on the foibles
of Spanish anarchism. He would be telling some heroic story about
Durruti, and she would remind him that while the CNT and FAI men were in
the dining hall eating and giving speeches about the libertarian ideal,
the women were cooking in the kitchen (where, given the windy rhetoric,
they generally preferred to be).
Pura had been a nurse in Spain but as it sometimes happens with
immigrants, she only worked as a nurseâs aid in Windsor. Federico had
had almost no formal education, only his apprenticeship and the
anarchist ateneos and academies, which ended when he was thirteen or
fourteen, and then his reading and voluminous correspondence. And yet
they were deeply cultivated peopleâboth of them prolific readers, poets,
and activists who loved the arts and embraced enduring human ideals.
Pura left notebooks of beautiful hand-written notes copied from art
textbooks, made beautiful arrangements of dried flowers, and wrote
formal poetry. Fede read and wrote poetry, and loved music and art, film
and history.
He could also be funny. Heâd put a finger on your shirt button, and when
you looked down he would bring it up and catch you on the nose. If
someone was blathering at him, he might fire off one of his famous
lines, Los vagones de tus necedades resbalan por las rieles de mi
indiferencia. (The train cars of your foolishness are sliding along the
rails of my indifference.) He would raise his arms sideways and invite
you to tickle his sides, and if you did heâd box your ears. He did this
with men and boys. With women it was a little different. Even when he
was on his last legs in the hospital he still had a way of coquetting
with the nurses without offending them, while needling me and another
male visitor.
Federico wrote many reports for the anarchist press in Spanish and
French, and in English for his union newsletter. He authored a monograph
on Tolstoy and other essays on a variety of subjects (including two
brief, lasting reflections on anarchism and the human condition, ââManâ
and His Judge,â and âLetter to a Friendâ). He carried on an active
correspondence and wrote many eulogies of comrades. (I found two of his
eulogies that were published in the Fifth Estate: âJosĂ© Peirats: A
Comrade, A Friend,â in the Winter 1990 issue, for one of Federicoâs
closest mentors and friends, author of Anarchists in the Spanish
Revolution and many other books; and âGerminal Gracia: The Marco Polo of
Anarchism,â in the Winter 1992 issue, which contains not only rich
material on Gracia but also vivid memories of the internment camps in
France and the libertarian anti-Franco underground.)
---
Federicoâs love of poetry led him to produce Momentos, a small
collection of his poems, in 1976, with elegies to his fallen comrades
and meditations on the human condition. The poems are modest, and
sometimes too sentimental (he grew up reading late romantic poetry, and
the effect can be felt.) Yet at times, in some surprising moments of
simplicity and honesty, one feels as well the influence and emotional
depth of great early twentieth century poetryâthe Machado brothers, LeĂłn
Felipe (whose work he admired), the Generation of 1927, and perhaps the
ancient oral traditions and romances, too. In his practice of a poetry
both simple and reflective, he was typically Spanish, typically Iberian.
In Federicoâs poetry one feels, inevitably, the grief, the failed
dreams, the surge and pull of hope and despair, and the sense of
humility and awe at lifeâs inherent uncertainties:
No se puede contar You canât count
el infinito infinity,
ni concebir nor conceive of
la eternidad; eternity;
pero hay realidades but there are intangible
intangibles realities
que no podemos we cannot
ignorar. ignore.
Simple, yes, but also admirable that in his poetry a question is worth
far more than an answer.
Or where he has an answer, itâs existential and personal:
ÂżQuĂ© es un dĂa? What is a day?
¿Qué es un año? What is a year?
¿Qué es una vida? What is a life?
Nada. Nothing.
¿Qué es un recuerdo? What is a memory?
Toda un vida. A whole life.
Perhaps because I knew him, these poems mean more to me than they would
to a stranger. They might not weigh as much on an academicâs scale. But
to me they are profound. Federico was deeply spiritual; he accepted
âintangible realitiesââan ideal of human solidarity, love for oneâs
brothers and sisters, self-sacrifice, dying for something that seemed
impossible. And a memory, for a man who lived in and with his memories
of revolution, of solidarity, of courageous self-sacrifice, and who with
great devotion collected documents of memory so that others might know
of these human idealsâwhat was a memory? Toda una vida.
Many people who met Federico or learned about him have written about
their admiration for him. To give one example, the poet Phil Levine was
one of Detroitâs most beloved sons (and an anarchist sympathizerâsee his
wonderful book, The Bread of Time, where he writes about anarchism and
Spain). A number of years ago, after Levine read his work in Ann Arbor,
I gave him a copy of the Fifth Estate with Federicoâs âLetter to a
Friend.â Levine later wrote to me, calling the essay âextraordinaryâ
(which suggests that if a poet of Levineâs stature saw poetry in
Federicoâs writing, it canât be only my sentiment working when I see
it). He added, âYou truly sense the depth of this manâs goodness & why
he has come to a vision in which the things of the earth are shared by
all. I showed it to my wife and she was overwhelmed by it. Unlike Pedro
Rojas in the poem I read by Cesar Vallejo [at the poetry reading in Ann
Arbor], this Federico has gotten to the meaning of things. (Vallejo
describes Pedro seized by the killers âjust as he was getting to the
meaning of things.â Most of us are at best getting close all of our
lives; Federico arrived.)â
Many others who knew him, both slightly and well, have written about him
with admiration and affection. In a tribute to Federico, Anatole
Dolgoff, son of the respected Russian-American anarcho-syndicalist Sam
Dolgoff, wrote that just about the last thing his father did when he was
dying was to call Federico and say farewell, and carry on. The younger
Dolgoff (who became a good friend of Federicoâs in his own right) adds,
âRussell Blackwell, a dear friend of my father and a neglected figure in
the history of the movementâa man who had fought on the side of the CNT
during 1937 May Uprising in Barcelona, who had been arrested many times
and tortured by the communists, who had come within an inch of being
executed by them, and barely escapedâtook one look at Federico, and
said, âThis guy is the real thing!ââ Anatole added, âIs there a human
being privileged to know Federico who can think otherwise?â
---
One of Federicoâs most vivid stories was from after the fall of the
Spanish Republic in 1939, when the refugees were crossing the Pyrenees
into France, ill and exhausted, some woundedâall dispirited, all unsure
of the future. They were also weak with hunger; Federico told us on a
number of occasions with a kind of wonder how they gathered acorns under
the oaks to eat and how they were sustained. He added (a comment that
appears in the Spanish edition of Anarchist Voices), âHow bitter those
acorns were!â
Those who have read Don Quixote will likely remember that since
classical times the oak tree has been a symbol of the Golden Age. Behind
young Fede Arcos, not yet nineteen years old, lay the ruins of one of
historyâs brief Golden Ages, and one of the most sublime dreams human
beings have dreamed. Those acorns were indeed bitter. Ahead lay great
uncertaintyâand we know now, more violence, more calamities and defeats.
But the people who had fought for a new world gathered and ate the
acorns and were sustained. May their dream sustain us, too. Federico
Arcos lived a life of passion and commitment with that new world always
in his heart, reminding us, as Rousseau once remarked, that the Golden
Age is neither before us nor behind, but within. Like others of his
generation, he proved by example that one may lose great historic
battles, and yet triumph in life.
Federico always seemed to think that he had fallen short of the people
who had made the ultimate sacrifice, but he served the cause of freedom,
and of historical memory, honorably and ably. His participation in the
revolution and his devotion to documenting el Ideal were both admirable
accomplishments. At the end of his life, he was able to donate and ship
his life work to the Biblioteca de Catalunya in Barcelona (the National
Library of Catalonia). The archive amounted to some ten thousand books
and documents, many of them previously unavailable in Spain. (See
http://antigua.memorialibertaria.org/spip.php?article1347.) A friend in
Barcelona wrote to me recently that people were astonished and thrilled
at the wealth of materials it offered, and not just Spanish documents
but also the American materials he had gathered. Other documents and
artifacts can be found at the Labadie Collection at the University of
Michigan. (See
http://www.lib.umich.edu/blogs/beyond-reading-room/anarchists-suitcase-honor-federico-arcos-1920-2015.)
In the last weeks and days of his life, Federico suffered, disoriented
and depressed, in the hospital and then a nursing home, either one an
unhappy place to end. At almost 95, life and death converging in him, he
was naturally a tatter of what he had been. He raged, and fought the
current.
When like Lear in his storm on the heath, you have nothing left and
almost nothing remains of you, you may find yourself reduced to what you
once truly were, and what you wished to be. And so we were struck by
what someone at the nursing home reported: that late in the first or
second night he was there they found him sitting at the bedside of
another inmate, who was unconscious; Federico was holding his hand,
comforting him and watching over him, like a comrade at the front.
The supreme law of life is love, said Tolstoy. Federico Arcos had that
love in him. And his love, like his dream, will sustain us, will remain
with us.
So, another toast. Federico Arcos, presente. ÂĄSalud y libertad!
This is a revised and expanded text of David Watson's contribution to
the remembrance for Federico Arcos at the Cass Café in Detroit on July
19, 2015.
Note: This article, along with additional material is available on the
Fifth Estate site at
https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/395-winter-2016-50th-anniversary/remembering-federico-arcos/