New pamphlet: José Xena Torrent: A Contribution to a Necessary Biography by Víctor García

Details and Introduction

As you may already know, the Anarchist Book Club has just published the above title as our first pamphlet. It contains a short preface by Nereida Xena Puig, the brief introduction reproduced below, and an Afterword. The main piece combined with the Afterword runs to 27 A5 pages. There are two black and white photographs of Xena and García together, generously provided by Nereida Xena. The pamphlets were published with black riso print by the Footprint Workers Cooperative. The cost of printing 100 copies was £155.

We are hoping to recover costs and give away a few copies to libraries. The pamphlets are available to buy for £2 plus p&p (in the UK this is £1.35 for second-class postage in a hardbacked envelope). The easiest way to pay is by Paypal, payable to abcwithdannyandjim@gmail.com - please contact us for alternatives.

If you’d like to order several copies for stalls or bookfairs, please let us know.

It is our assumption that there is some appetite for printed translations of sources on Spanish anarchism. If this proves to be the case, further pamphlets will follow.

The author and subject are further discussed in our latest podcast episode: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/abcwithdannyandjim/episodes/33--Vctor-Garca-Jos-Xena-Torrent-A-Contribution-to-a-Necessary-Biography-ABC-Edition-e2d3puf

---

Introduction

The name José Xena may be familiar to readers. At a meeting of anarchist activists in Barcelona held at the outset of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), he provided the only vote against the CNT’s participation in the Comité Central de Milicias Antifascistas de Cataluña (Central Committee of Antifascist Militias – CCMA). This was a quasi-governmental body set up in Catalonia in July 1936. The CNT’s collaboration in this project represented a temporary renunciation of the organisation’s goal of libertarian communism and placed its leadership in an ambivalent relationship to the revolution that transformed swathes of Republican Spain in the first months of the Civil War.

Very little has been written about Xena in English. This obituary by Víctor García was first published in two parts in Orto, a Spanish anarchist magazine edited by the veteran CNT activist Ramón Sentís, in 1989.

Víctor García was the penname of Tomás Gracia Ibars, better known as Germinal Gracia (1919-1991). Like Xena and Sentís, he had been an anarchist activist during the Spanish Civil War and later spent many years in exile in Venezuela. There, he kept up a multilingual and voluminous correspondence, edited the magazine Ruta, and wrote numerous books and articles.

Despite the modest title, ‘A Contribution to a Necessary Biography’ remains the lengthiest study of Xena’s life published to date. The Afterword fills in some detail regarding the period given least attention in Victor García’s obituary, from July 1936 to May 1937.