A lecture on Spanish deportees on Monday

Spanish historian Carlos Madrid will describe a significant but little known chapter of Northern Marianas history during a public lecture to be held at the American Memorial Park Visitors Center on Monday evening, April 10.

Over an eight-year period, from 1870 to 1877, the Spanish government exiled almost 800 Spanish political prisoners to the Mariana Islands. While many of the deportees were sent to Guam, 400 were transferred to Saipan.

Their arrival on Saipan in the summer of 1875, without proper food, clothing, medicine or shelter, coincided with a severe drought that devastated the island’s food supplies. This combination of circumstances resulted in near starvation for the deportees and extreme hardship for Saipan’s 800 indigenous residents.

Only food supplies rushed from the Philippines by order of the Spanish administration in Guam averted disaster. Even with the arrival of the emergency rations, life for the exiles and local residents remained extremely difficult, a situation that would continue until June 1876 when Spanish King Alfonso XII issued a royal amnesty that permitted these political prisoners to return to their homes in Spain.

Madrid will provide details about this nearly forgotten event, together with an overview of Spanish governance in the Marianas in the mid-1870s. Madrid spent more than a year poring over 19th century Spanish government documents in archives in Spain, Guam, and the Philippines in order to piece together a coherent story of the deportation. He also tracked down and interviewed descendents of some of the deportees in an effort to record any surviving oral accounts.

Madrid’s research is presented in a 250-page manuscript entitled Beyond the Distance: Governance Politics and Deportation in the Marianas from 1870 to 1877 that will be published by the Humanities Council and the Division of Historic Preservation later this year. The book will be illustrated with pertinent maps, drawings and photographs. The book will also include two images of Carolinian residents on Saipan in 1875 thought to be the earliest photographs taken of the islands.

The project was supported by grants awarded to the NMI Council for the Humanities by the Spanish Program for Cultural Cooperation and the CNMI Division of Historic Preservation.

The public is invited to attend this educational event that will begin at 6pm. Interested individuals may contact Council staff at 235-4785 for more details. (PR)