Almost a century in the Libertarian and Esperanto movements

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This text was published in Liberté Ouvrière #1

On the 30^th December 2020 Eduardo Vivancos passed away at the age of 100. He leaves behind a family and nearly a century of dedication to a number of causes from athletics, Anarchosyndicalism, and minority languages especially Catalan and Esperanto. I think his life is worth remembering and while in the Spanish world his death was followed with numerous tributes and retrospectives, including a feature in Corredor a popular magazine dedicated to running, and a lot of friends mourned him in Esperanto texts, he’s largely unknown in English. A short blog post I wrote to mark his passing is the first hit when his name is searched in English, though there was also an article in Fifth Estate #400 written in 2018 by his fellow Esperantist Xavi Alcalde that serves as a short introduction. Personally, speaking Vivancos’s writing was some of the first I read in Esperanto that I could mostly understand that wasn’t written as a teaching tool, though Vivancos did dabble in that as well. I guess I can credit Vivancos for pushing me from viewing learning the language as a hobby into something to be taken seriously.

The son of Domingo Vivancos, Eduardo Vivancos was born into a working-class family in Barcelona on the 19^th of September 1920. Shortly before his fourteenth birthday in 1934 Vivancos left elementary school and became an apprentice. In September of that year Vivancos had enrolled in a worker’s school (Escuela del Trabajo) which held classes in the evenings. While at the school he mixed with a group of young workers who were members of the Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth (FIJL) which he would join and shortly after would also become a member of the Student Federation of Free Thinkers (Federación Estudiantil de Conciencias Libres).

A year later in 1935 Vivancos joined the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), he would remain a member of the CNT for the rest of his life. In 1936 Vivancos looked forward to the People’s Olympiad that was being prepared in Barcelona as an alternative to the official Olympics that were being hosted in Berlin. The first piece of writing I read by Vivancos were his recollections of those days when he would go to the training grounds and practice and mingle with hundreds of foreigners from dozens of nations. The enthusiasm made a great impression on him, unfortunately the preparations for the games also marked the beginning of the bloody civil war and the appearance of Franco as a political leader. The games were not only called off by the Spanish army revolt but the games themselves were targeted by fascist sabotage and intimidation during the preparations.

During the Spanish revolution and civil war initially Vivancos focused on his studies, enrolling in the Popular Encyclopaedic Ateneo (Ateneo Enciclopédico Popular) where among other subjects he was taught Esperanto, and like the Libertarian movement he would remain an active Esperantist for the rest of his life often combining the two in practice. In 1937 the Spanish Republic created a number of Workers Institutes (Institutos Obreros) a high school system for workers, Vivancos passed the entrance exams in December 1937 and enrolled, however the war situation continued to degrade for the Republic and so shortly afterwards in 1938 Vivancos together with some fellow Institute class mates volunteered to serve in a battalion of the 26^th division of the Durruti Column and served at the Montsec front and took part in the battle of Lleida among other operations.

Whilst in the 26^th division Vivancos was part of a small teaching and correspondence circle of Esperantists that included the battalion commander Ginés Martínez. At the time most of the Spanish left and libertarian movements had embraced Esperanto and had Esperanto newspapers from the Communist party of Spain, to the POUM the CNT, Anarchists and General government of Catalunya, and were actively using the language to broadcast news to the outside world and contact sympathetic foreigners. In response to this the Esperanto movement in fascist zones would be singled out for bloody repression. An example of this is the fate of the Esperanto club in Cordoba whose entire membership was executed by a Falange party firing squad.

Unfortunately, as we all know the war continued to go badly and the revolution of 36 continued to retreat, by February 1939 Vivancos along with thousands of other committed anti-fascists had to escape Spain to France, he did so on foot crossing the Pyrenees in winter. While in France Vivancos and his family were sent to concentration camps established by the French government for Spanish refugees, he was moved from one camp to another for several years, at one point in 1940 staying in the same barracks as the famous Catalan author and poet Jaume Grau Casas author of Catalan Anthology among many others. The two would communicate almost exclusively in Esperanto, in fact his incarceration and transfers seem to have aided Vivancos in his Esperanto studies and teaching.

The Vivancos family would not be reunited until after the Second World War in 1947, by this time Vivancos had met and fell in love with fellow Spanish exile Ramona Comella, the two were married in Paris on the 5^th of December 1945, they had two children, Floreal (1947) and Talia (1948). While in Paris Vivancos joined the World Anational Association (Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda) or SAT, an organisation of left-wing Esperantists of many tendencies from around the world.

Also, in the aftermath of WWII the Spanish libertarian movement began to reorganise itself and devised strategies to resist the established Franco dictatorship. As part of this process the FIJL had decided to build an international organisation for Anarchist youth, as part of this project Vivancos was made a delegate of the Spanish section, unfortunately this plan did not progress much further due to the global weakness of the Anarchist movement. More substantially was the founding of two Esperanto language newspapers Black Flag (Nigra Flago) and Anti-statist (Senŝtatano) becoming the editor of Anti-statist. This activity would bare some fruit, the correspondence service of Anti-statist was able to exploit a post war relaxation in hostility to Esperanto by the Spanish government and send letters to Spain to reconnect the exile community with family and companions still inside the country. And the contact with foreign Libertarian Esperantists including the Chinese anarchist Lu Chen Bo and the Japanese anarchist Taiji Yamaga led to increased co-operation. In 1963 Vivancos would collaborate with Taiji Yamaga to translate Laozi’s Dao de Qing into Spanish titled « Libro del Camino y de la Virtud ».

In 1954 Vivancos emigrated to Canada and would remain a resident of Toronto until his death. But while in Canada he maintained his commitment to his causes and opposition to Franco. He became a member of ADEC (« Asociación Democrática Española Canadiense« ) a group for anti-francoist Spanish migrants and exiles, attending protests and organising meetings. Vivancos would finally return to Spain in 1976 after 37 years of exile when the Francoist regime gave way to the democratic transition, and would return to Spain and Catalunya on many occasions. In 1986 he gave a lecture to the 59^th Congress of SAT in San Cuget on the 50^th anniversary of the Spanish civil war, drawing heavily from his recollections of the atmosphere and conditions of Barcelona and Spain in 1936.

At the end of his life Vivancos received many honours from SAT and the wider Esperanto community, and with nearly a hundred years of dedicated activity including on the frontline it’s not hard to see why. But I also find his writing and the way he was able to use Esperanto to support the goals of international solidarity and libertarian resistance quite inspiring too. I said at the start that Vivancos is little known in the Anglosphere, I hope to correct this. In addition to writing up this short memorial I am also translating his Esperanto texts into English and hope others will be inspired.

Reddebrek