New Battlefields, New Marginals: Orphans and Refugees in Zaragoza during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939)

The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) was an example of total war and one of the first humanitarian crises of twentieth-century Europe. The aim of this chapter is to explore the welfare practices designed to cope with the main effects of the conflict, including refugees and war orphans, through the analysis of old and new welfare agents, and discourses based on a case study of the city of Zaragoza, one of the main capitals of the territory controlled by the rebels. Due to the continuity of state structures, which enjoyed a long tradition of collaboration with Catholic ecclesiastical institutions, traditional conceptions of marginalized groups persisted, although they were redefined and politicized. It was thus an instrument to guarantee political loyalty to the new authorities and to exert a thorough control over refugees and war orphans, conceived as potential dissidents. Likewise, the new agents had the capacity to mobilize human resources and carved out a new place for themselves in the emerging Franco dictatorship. The management of social assistance in nationalist Spain was, in short, a way for the construction of Franco’s ‘New State’.