Dear friends,

We are in the preliminary stages of discussions with sponsors and venues about an idea whose time has come: a major museum exhibition that will use your photographs, documents, objects and moving images, to tell the unknown story of our beloved Spanish Immigrants in the US (1868-1945). If everything lines up just right, the show will open about a year from now (Spring, 2018) in Madrid, and then travel all around Spain. We hope to produce an English-language version of the show as well, which could tour the United States.

As always, we need your support to bring this idea to fruition.

Photo courtesy of Gloria López, of Winters, California.  Gloria preserves treasures like the metal tube in which her ancestors stored their travel documents, and a Spanish mortar and pestle than has been handed down from generation to generation.

For the next several months, we will be intensifying our field work all over the country (and in Spain), hoping to digitize even more family archives, and trying to identify objects that might be featured in the exhibition.

Do you have old photos and documents of your Spanish immigrant ancestors? (We’re primarily interested in the period 1868-1945).

Do you have objects (eg trunks, suitcases, document holders, photos, kitchen utensils, furniture, musical instruments, garments, keepsakes) that your ancestors may have brought with them from Spain when they came over? Or that they may have acquired in the US and that speak to the experience of Spanish immigrants in the US?

If the answer is “yes” to either or both of these questions, and if you’d be willing to consider sharing your treasures –digitally or on loan—please reach out to us at whitestoneridge@gmail.com.

Now that our book “Invisible Immigrants” is just about sold out, let’s work together to realize this next dream, to make known the neglected story of our unsung immigrant ancestors.

¡Salud!

Luis Argeo and James D. Fernández