Decolonizing Refuge: Indigenous Solidarity Toward Spanish Exiles in Mexico, 1936–1939

Abstract In 1939, Mexico granted political asylum to thousands of Spaniards forced into exile at the end of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). This article examines how Indigenous campesinos responded to the Mexican government’s efforts to resettle thousands of Spaniards onto colonias agrícolas (agricultural colonies) to entice Indigenous subsistence farmers away from their traditional land tenure practices and to become wage laborers. While Mexican state officials envisioned refugee colonies as sites of racial and economic modernization, Indigenous campesinos framed their support for Spanish exiles as acts of internationalist solidarity fostered by mutual aid rather than capitalist exploitation. Most significantly, many Indigenous communities advocated for the integration of exiles into existing campesino communities through the allocation of parcels of their collectively controlled lands, known as ejidos. As a result, Indigenous campesinos articulated radical alternatives to revolutionary state building initiatives that fostered reciprocal forms of mutual aid between the receiving communities and the refugees. This article therefore argues that Indigenous campesinos in Mexico did not see exiles as settlers or the descendants of earlier Spanish colonizers, but as comrades in a global struggle for land, political autonomy, and revolutionary change.