Drawing from Xosé María Núñez Seixas’ concept of the “diaspora myth” (2002), and entering into dialogue with Akiko Tsuchiya and Aurélie Vialette’s Cultural Legacies of Slavery in Modern Spain (ed. 2025), Diego Baena analyzes the modern-day representations and commemorations of the story of some 1700 enslaved Galicians brought to Cuba under contract by Urbano Feijóo y Sotomayor’s Compañía Patriótica-Mercantil de ayuda a Cuba y salvación de Galicia (Naranjo Orovio 1999). Baena historically situates the story of the Galician ‘colonos’ within the broader context of the continued enslavement of African and afro-descendent peoples in the Caribbean, as well as the Spanish colonial state and criollo planter class’ racist demographic policy of blanqueamiento and the simultaneous importation of primarily Chinese laborers through the Coolie Trade (Moriuchi 2024). He analyzes contemporary cultural productions which shed light on the role of the enslaved Galician sugar-cane workers within colonial Cuban society: the RTVE documentary Gallegos por esclavos (2015), and three historical novels: Una casa en amargura by Elisa Vázquez de Gey (2015), Azucre by Bibiana Candia (2021), and El infierno by “Carmen Mola,” pseudonym of novelists Jorge Díaz, Agustín Martínez y Antonio Mercero (2023).
Sofía Fernández González shifts our attention to O Couto Mixto, a historically independent territory and former microstate along a Raia—a natural borderland between Galicia and Portugal, conformed by the Salas River and the villages of Rubiás and Meaus—a space of in-betweenness; politically, linguistically and culturally. Her presentation examines its literary representation in the short story Liño, compiled in the book Arraianos by Xosé Luis Méndez Ferrín. Through the lens of “linguistic tellurism”, she frames language as a force shaped by the land and its shifting sovereignties. The relationship between land, language and identity showcases how lingua/linguaxe in O Couto Mixto creates a broader dialogue between Galician, Portuguese, Spanish, and stateless linguistic identities, and how this language can be a political trench refusing general linguistic impositions. Fernández situates O Couto Mixto within transnational narratives of resistance, belonging, and cultural and political negotiation within the Iberian Peninsula.
Adam Mahler explores intercultural exchange in medieval Galicia by examining the legacy of the muwashshah (pl. muwashshahat)—an Andalusi poetic form that combines metered strophes in classical Arabic or Hebrew with an Ibero-Romance or colloquial Arabic envoi—in the Galician-Portuguese songs of Alfonso the Wise and other Iberian troubadours. Drawing on new materialist theory, he reads the Andalusi-inflected songs in Galician-Portuguese under the rubric of a relational, non-hierarchical poetics rather than a citational, territorial and ethnoessentialized one, in a break with previous scholarship on the cantigas. His new materialist reading of the polymetrics and multilingualism that typify this Galician troubadour subgenre helps to better understand the perdurability of Galician as a language of literary expression throughout medieval Iberia—and across lines of geopolitical and ethnoracial difference.
Finally, José María Rodríguez García challenges recent historiography focused on the northwestern Iberian homeland vis-à-vis its reductionist projections in the Americas, often pitting Generalissimo Franco’s many-sided Acción Exterior and its agents overseas against a two-pronged substate nation neatly composed of Galicia (do) interior, invested in cultural resistance to the detriment of political self-differentiation, and an ostensibly maximalist, somewhat self-aggrandizing Galicia (do) exterior. He proposes a different approach based on a new critical concept – that of “cleavable enclave,” which he employs to designate the endless divisibility of micro-territorial units (the city, the immigrant society, even the ocean liner). Through a careful study of immigrant letter writing and the libros de actas compiled by mutual-aid societies, he theorizes that the either peaceful negotiation or betrayal or rapprochement involving two or more self-organized Galician cohorts on American soil emerged within complex circumstances of entanglement, often pushing individuals into joining two or more reciprocally antagonistic platforms. He argues that the significance of each act should not be all-too-hurriedly diluted by superimposing on it a homogenizing larger context that renders those multiple memberships invisible.
In exploring Galicia’s familial relations with global cultures, all four presenters offer diverse perspectives that challenge nationalist cultural frameworks, thereby opening new avenues and methodologies for research in Galician Studies. Across all presentations, Galicia emerges as a transnational community that complicates our understanding of identities, borders and trans-Atlantic relations.