Federico García Lorca was only 38 when he was brutally killed by General Franco’s troops in 1936 at the start of the Spanish Civil War. Today, he remains a towering figure among modern poets and playwrights. He left the world three great tragedies, Blood Wedding, Yerma, and The House of Bernarda Alba, and such poems as “Lament for the Death of a Bullfighter” and “Poet in New York.” His works are marked by a personal vision and an empathy toward the peasants of his native Andalusia.

Manuel “Manny” Fernández-Montesinos García is García Lorca’s nephew and has translated into concrete achievements the ideals in his uncle’s works. He championed the rights of Spanish workers in German industry, which brought him into the struggle for the freedom of Spain itself.

Manny was born into “a good bourgeois liberal family in a small provincial city,” Granada. His mother, García Lorca’s younger sister, had married a physician. Long active in the Socialist Party, Manny’s father served 10 days as mayor before he was shot by fascist troops; García Lorca was executed 3 days later.

Only 4 years old at the time, Manny didn’t learn the circumstances of his father’s death until later when he overheard conversations by family friends. “I then read about it,” he said, “in a short English biography of my uncle.”

The surviving relatives moved to the United States in August 1940, settling first in New Jersey and then New York City. There he became friends with high school classmate Victor Navasky ’54, today the publisher and editorial director of The Nation, who knew him as Manolo. Navasky said they worked together one summer at a Long Island school for “privileged children of Latin American dictators— macho kids, New York types. We were singing waiters, and we put on The Mikado. Manolo played Koko, the one who’s ‘got a little list.’”

During the McCarthy era, Elisabeth Irwin High School “was considered a hotbed of progressive radical stuff,” Navasky said. “A classic Marxist history teacher was on the attorney general’s list of subversives—a great teacher. The principal was called before a congressional committee after we left.”

Manny said he enrolled at Swarthmore “because it was well known in intellectual circles: liberal, with a tinge of Quakerism, coed, small but with high standards.” He and Navasky decided to room together. Did they stay up late discussing international

affairs? “No,” said Navasky. “We discussed girls. And baseball—Manolo was a fanatic Dodger fan, and I was a Giants fan. We watched the World Series on TV and saw Bobby Thompson’s home run.”

Navasky said he’ll never forget Manny’s weekly morning show on WSRN: “He’d be-

gin it with Leadbelly’s ‘Good Morning Blues’ and then give misinformation like ‘Steak and eggs are being served for breakfast in Parrish.’ Or he’d say it was 7:45 a.m., and we had plenty of time to get to class, when it was really 7:58. He had a great sense of humor.”

Navasky also remembers campfire parties in Crum Meadow, organized by Dan Singer ’51, where Manny would sing songs from the Lincoln Brigade, the international contingent that fought with the anti-Franco forces in the Spanish Civil War.

As a freshman, Manny had the distinction of dating a senior, Marilyn Miller Minden ’51. “What I remember most about Manolo,” she said, “was his sense of fun. He was always alert to everything, and he made sure that other people were awake too. And he was fierce about justice. ‘Always protest,’ I remember hearing him say once, almost to himself, laughing. I thought that moment defined him: laughing and protesting.”

Manny didn’t have a clear career goal as a young man because of “so much improvisation” in his life. The family’s time in America was “unsteady and unpredictable. Always waiting for something to end or start: the end of the Civil War; waiting for the end of World War II, when we thought the Allies would overthrow Franco instead of backing his dictatorship. We felt our sojourn in the United States was provisional. We lived in the United States for 11 years with visitor visas.”

Returning to Spain under Franco was difficult, Manny said, “but the nostalgia of returning was stronger.” His aunt spent the summers of 1950 and 1951 there “to see how involved one had to be with the regime.” She discovered that “to live peacefully, you no longer had to be an active follower of the regime as in previous years. You could not, of course, be openly against it.” So, in 1951, the other relatives went home.

As a University of Madrid law student, Manny joined the secret Agrupación Socialista Universitaria. In 1956, he was arrested during a student riot for distributing leaflets demanding the free election of student representatives—costing him a year in prison.

Once Manny was released, García Lorca’s German translator helped him get a scholarship to the Goethe University in Frankfurt. He already had enough credits for a doctorate in law from Madrid, he said, “but in the spring of 1958, I started to work for the German Trade Unions and abandoned my studies.”

Then, this son of the Andalusian intelligentsia threw himself into the cause of immigrant Spanish laborers, working for the Frankfurt local chapter of the metal workers union, “the strongest, most influential and progressive union in Germany. In the late 1950s, 150,000 Spanish workers were in Germany; by 1970, there were nearly a million. Manny and his colleagues ran campaigns to get them to join the union, publishing a newsletter in Spanish and explaining the benefits of collective bargaining. “Most important was to show what a difference there was between the fascist trade unions under Franco and free trade unionism,” he said.

“All this time, I was in contact with the Spanish organizations in exile in France. We founded sections of these organizations among Spanish workers in Germany. Then, we established direct relations with clandestine organizations in Spain itself, so that I spent half my time in Spain and the other half in Germany.”

In 1964, Manny returned home and established a legal practice, specializing in labor law. It was secretly funded by the German metal workers union and the International Metal Workers Association in Geneva, with backing from the United Auto Workers in the United States. “Spanish trade unionism had always been political,” he said. “Each party had its own union.”

The exiled leaders of the Spanish socialist union, Manny said, “were older men who had not lived in Spain since 1939 and did not see a changing reality. Our legal practice was really a short-lived front for the underground socialist union, working without the consent of the leadership in exile. In order not to be considered traitors, we founded a new movement without political affiliation.”

He and three colleagues attended a meeting of the International Metal Workers Association in Amsterdam in June 1965. Two months later, they were arrested. “Even though I was freed on bail—circumstances had changed since 1956, when there was no bail for ‘political crimes’—I could not leave the country,” he said. The four were sentenced to six months in prison for “illegal association.”

After his release, he went to Germany on vacation, where he learned from an American friend at Merrill-Lynch that another management consulting firm was looking for someone with his background. He applied and was hired. “I was really in a maze as to my future,” he said. “I certainly did not want to risk new jail terms. Freeing the Spanish socialist organization from the exiled leadership seemed impossible. So I decided it would be fun to see industry from the other side.”

Manny got more business experience in the mid-1970s at the largest Spanish-owned food corporation. By now, he said the socialists “had succeeded in doing what some of us probably tried to do too soon, when things were more dangerous: wrest the Spanish socialist movement from the exilees. In 1974, I joined the Socialist Party.” He “participated in semiclandestine activities, political rallies, protest marches, handing out leaflets. The first public manifestation of homage to my uncle took place on his birthday, June 5, 1976, in the small town near Granada where he was born. The roads were heavily guarded by the Guardia Civil, and there were armed military vehicles at every crossroad within miles. Several well-known actresses read some of his poems, and then there were short speeches.”

In 1977, Manny helped make history when he was elected from Granada to Spain’s first freely elected Cortes (parliament) since 1936. As the only landowner among the Socialists, he said, “I was speaker for the Party and second vice president of the Agriculture Committee.”

In 1984, Manny and his uncle’s other heirs established the Federico García Lorca Foundation, which maintains a museum, sends exhibits around the world, and supervises the literary estate. He often gives speeches and interviews and retains an intense interest in politics. “I’m so excited,” he said, “to think that I will accompany my daughters when they vote for the first time. Sometimes I go to protest marches with my family, especially against terrorism in the Basque Country, from where my wife comes and where we go on vacation every summer.”

Manny also maintains his Swarthmore ties. When the Alumni College Abroad traveled to Spain in 2000, he was the center of attention at their first dinner in Madrid. And when Victor and Annie Navasky celebrated their 35th wedding anniversary there, he said, “Manolo and his wife showed us the town.”

Barbara Haddad Ryan is director of affiliate and public relations at the Phi Beta Kappa Society in Washington, D.C.