El Terrible: Life and Labor in Pueblonuevo 1887-1939

<p>This book is a biography of Pueblonuevo del Terrible a mining town located in Andalusia Spain. Based on previously unexamined sources the study paints a fresh portrait of industrial workers and their families in Córdoba province enriching our understanding of this mostly agricultural region.</p><p>Previous studies of laboring communities in Spain have identified radical workers miners among them as a destabilizing element due to their insurgent protest activity including lethal violence. This study by contrast describes both worker activism and cross-class organizing as constructive not destructive and aimed at integration into Spanish society. Economically the mining zone was dominated by a French company in the Rothschild portfolio. But by running their own city waging peaceful labor strikes raising a church building housing and honoring their dead residents turned a quasi-colonial outpost into a <i>pueblo</i> worth defending and they rallied in defense of the Republic at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. In the making of Pueblonuevo del Terrible Spanish men and women contended with the perils of mine work the jolts of industrial capitalism creeping fascism and civil war.</p><p>As such this book tells a village-scale story of global events that defined the twentieth century.</p>