A version of this article first appeared in Liberte Ouviere un Journal Anarcho-syndicaliste
Notes on the life of Eduardo Vivancos
1920-2020
Almost
a century in the Libertarian and Esperanto movements
Reddebrek
2021
“Paroli Esperanton estis iam esenca parto de anarkiismo.”
(There was a time when speaking Esperanto was an essential part of being an anarchist.)
On
the 30th
of 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 speaking world his death
was marked 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 is 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 Xavier Alcade
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 suppose I should credit Vivancos with pushing me from
viewing 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 19th
of September 1920. In 1934, shortly before his fourteenth birthday,
Vivancos left elementary school and became an apprentice. In
September of that year Vivancos had also 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) an organisation that he would join along
with becoming a member of the Student Federation of Free Thinkers
(Federacion Estudiantil
de Concienecias Libres).
A
year later Vivancos would join the Confederacion
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 of the time made a
big impact on him, unfortunately there preparations for the games
coincided with the beginning of the bloody civil war and the
appearance of Franco as a political leader. The games were not only
called off at the last minute by news of the revolt of the Spanish
army, but the preparations for the games had also been targetted by a
campaign of fascist sabotage and intimidation.
During
the Spanish Revolution and Civil War Vivancos initially focused on
his studies, enrolling in the Ateneo
Enciclopedico Popular,
where among other subjects he was taught Esperanto. He would remain
an active Esperantist for the rest of his life, often combining it
with his activism with the Libertarian movement. In
1937 the Spanish Republic created a number of Worker’s Institutes
(Institutos
Obreros)
a high school system for workers, Vivancos passed the entrance exams
in December 1937 and enrolled. However the war situation continue to
get worse for the Republic and so in 1938 Vivancos and some fellow
class mates from the institute volunteered to serve in a battalion of
the 26th
division of the Durruti Column and served at the Montsec front and
saw combat at the battle of Lleida, and participated in other
operations.
Whilst
serving in the 26th
division Vivancos was part of a small teaching and correspondence
circle of Esperantists which included Gines Martinez the battalion
commander. At the time most of the Spanish left and Libertarian
movements had embraced Esperanto and were publishing Esperanto
newspapers. From the Communist Party of Spain, to
the Workers Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) the CNT and other
Anarchist groups, and even the General Government of Catalunya, all
were actively using the language to broadcast news to the outside
world and establish contacts with sympathetic foreigners. In response
to this the Esperanto movement was singled out for bloody persecution
within Fascist zones. An example of this repression was the fate of
the Esperanto club in Cordoba, the Fascist Falange party organised a
firing squad and murdered its entire membership.
Unfortunately as
we’re all aware, the war continued to go badly and the revolution
continued to retreat, by February 1939 Vivancos along with thousands
of other committed anti-fascists had to escape Spain to France.
Vivancos did this on foot, crossing the Pyrenees in winter. While in
France the Vivancos family were separated and sent to concentration
camps that had been built by the French government to house Spanish
refugees. He was moved from one camp to another over several years,
at one point in 1940 he was billeted in the same barracks as the
famous Catalan author and poet Jaume Grau Casas, the author of
Catalan Anthology and many other works. The two communicated almost
exclusively in Esperanto, if anything the incarceration and constant
transferring seem to have boost Eduardo Vivancos’s studies and
teaching of the language.
The
Vivancos family
were not reunited until after the Second World War in 1947, by that
time Eduardo had met and fallen in love with fellow Spanish exile
Ramona Comella, the two married in Paris on the 5th
of December 1945, they had two children, Floreal (1947) and Talia
(1948). While in Paris Eduardo
Vivancos joined the World Anational Association the Sennacieca Asocio
Tutmonda or SAT, and 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 planned out strategies to resist the entrenched
Franco dictatorship. As part of this process, the FIJL had decided to
build an international federation 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 at that time. A more
substantial attempt at international networking was the founding of
two Esperanto language newspapers the Nigra
Flago (Black
Flag) and Senŝtatano
(Without
a State), Vivancos was a contributor to both and editor of
Senŝtatano. This
activity would bear some fruit, the correspondance service of
Senŝtatano
sucessfully
exploited a relaxation in hostility to Esperanto by the Spanish
government to send letters to Spain, this reconnected many exiles
with family and friends still living under Franco. And
the contact with foreign Libertarian minded Esperantists like the
Chinese anarchist Lu Chen Bo and the Japanese anarchist Taiji Yamaga
led to increased co-operation in many ways. In 1963 Eduardo Vivancos
and Taiji Yamaga worked together to produce a Spanish translation of
the famous Chinese philosoper Laozi’s Dao de Qing, it was titled
“Libro del Camino y de la Virtud”, Book of the way and Virtue in
English.
In
1954 Vivancos emigrated to Toronto Canada and would remain a resident
until his death in 2020. He maintained his commitment to his two life
causes Esperanto and Anarchism and his opposition to Franco while
living in Canada. He joined the Asociacion Democratica Espanola
Canadiense ADEC, a group for anti-francoist Spanish migrants and
exiles living in Canada. As a member, he attended demonstrations and
organised meetings. Eduardo Vivancos would return to Spain in 1976
after a 37-year exile, when the Francoist regime crumbled and a
stilted democratic transition was taking shape. He would make many
visit to Spain and the Catalunya region throughout the remainder of
his life. In 1986 he gave a lecture to the 59th
Congress of SAT in San Cuget on the 5oth anniversary of the Spanish
Civil War, the lecture drew heavily from his recollections of the
atmosphere and conditions on the streets of Barcelona and the Spain
in 1936.
At
the end of his life Eduardo Vivancos received many honours from SAT
and the wider Esperanto community, and with nearly a hundred years of
dedicated activity including on the front-lines on a mountain range
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 very inspiring too. I said at
the start that Eduardo 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 in English and working on an English
language wikipedia article to complement the already existing
versions in Spanish, Catalan and Esperanto. By doing this, I hope
others will learn of him and an be inspired.
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