Cuban-influenced Latin rhythms have
continued to pervade American music
from the 1950s, when the mambo was
very popular, to the present day.
Spanish Americans
Another important source of Hispanic
immigration to the United States was
Spain itself. About 100,000 people immi-
grated from Spain to the United States
between 1900 and 1931. This was a small
number compared with the millions who
came from other European countries,
but it represented an increased rate of
Spanish immigration to the United States
from that of the 19th century. Steamship
travel made the trip faster and cheaper
than in previous decades, attracting
Spanish farmers and tradespeople who
were fleeing poverty, civil turbulence,
and, in some cases, military service in
their homeland. Spanish immigration to
the United States was curbed after the
1920s by the same quota system that lim-
ited other immigration, particularly that
of southern and eastern Europeans.
Spanish immigrants tended to be
better educated and more skilled than
other European immigrants. Many set-
tled in New York City or Tampa or went
west to work as ranchers or farmers.
About 8,000 Spanish immigrants settled
in Hawaii from 1906 to 1913 to work in
the sugarcane fields; many of them later
migrated to San Francisco, California.
In the 1930s the Spanish Civil War
(1936–1939) gave Spanish people a new
reason to emigrate. The war broke out
when right-wing Nationalists, led by
General Francisco Franco and his fascist
Falange Party, revolted against the left-
wing Popular Front leadership of the
Second Republic. Nationalist forces con-
trolled southern and western Spain by
August 1936, while their opponents, the
Loyalists or Republicans, remained strong
in Catalonia and the Basque provinces.
Fascist Germany and Italy supported
Franco with arms and advisers, while the
Soviet Union sent aid to the Republicans.
Idealists from around the world, including
the United States, volunteered to join
international brigades fighting for the
Republican cause. By the time the
Nationalists won in 1939, ushering in
Franco’s long dictatorship (1939–1975),
about 1 million people had died in Spain
and more than 500,000 had fled the coun-
try, the majority of them never to return.
Because fascism placed strict limits
on the intellectual and creative freedom
of writers, artists, and academics, intellec-
tuals and artists opposed to Franco had
particular cause to leave Spain during or
soon after the Spanish Civil War. They
included poet Juan Ramón Jiménez
(1881–1958), who had been appointed
by the Republican government as hon-
orary cultural attaché to the United
States. Jiménez first immigrated to Cuba
before coming to the United States and
ultimately settling in Puerto Rico. He
won the Nobel Prize for literature in- Pablo Casals (1876–1973), cellist,
composer, and conductor, aided the
Republican effort during the war by hold-
ing benefit concerts. After the war he
vowed he would never return to Spain
while Franco was in power, and he never
did. He lived in exile in France until the
1950s, when he moved to Puerto Rico,
his mother’s birthplace. He often traveled
to the U.S. mainland to give recitals.
THE GREAT DEPRESSION
The Great Depression, the worldwide
economic crisis that in the United StatesTHE AGE OF WORLD WARS 149Spanish-American musicians at fiesta, Taos, New Mexico, 1940 (Library of Congress)