Alicia Mayer

My name is Alicia Mayer. I am a historian and research professor at the Autonomous National University of Mexico (UNAM). At the end of 1984 I met the person who would become not only my professional mentor and guide, but who would also become a father to me: Juan Antonio Ortega y Medina (1913-1992). Before expressing my gratitude and recounting his role in my professional development, I want to recall some lines that, with a sense of foreboding, the famous poet Pedro Garfias wrote in June 1939 on board the Sinaia, the ship carrying some 1,800 Spanish refugees exiled by the Civil War. The adoptive country would receive “a Spanish river of red blood/of generous, overflowing blood”. 

I hadn’t been born when the cream of Spanish intellectuals in the arts and sciences arrived in Mexico. My country took in some 25,000 people who had decided to seek asylum on the other side of the ocean. Who would have guessed that a Young Andalucian artilleryman, devastated by the defeat of the Republic and exile, would, a quarter of a century later would become my teacher and generously give me the tools to fulfill my life and my intellectual work? 

The Spanish Civil War was an enormous tragedy, a wretched event that brought death and desolation to Spain, but for my country – and for me – the arrival of those transplanted ones, as the philosopher José Gaos called them, was a blessing. Juan Antonio Ortega y Medina trained me, not only through his erudite teaching but as an example of how to live a life. I have continued studying, analyzing and debating the topics he explored in depth: the history of Spain in the early modern era, the Anglo-Spanish conflict of the 16th and 17th centuries and its projection into North America through colonization, the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation, Indigenous American sim the European and Euro-American consciousness, and travel literature among other equally fascinating subjects.

I have written five books and I can state that in my work I have sought to establish a continuity with the suggestive matters my teacher from Malaga studied. For many years I have endeavoured to make the work and thought of Ortega y Medina known and recognized, especially in Spain and the United States. My colleague Cristina González and I have produced a seven-volume collection of his work that has been published by the UNAM’S Institute for Historical Research. Ortega y Medina made important contributions to historical knowledge, but they have gone unnoticed in his homeland, and his studies of Anglo-American colonial history were, unfortunately, never translated. I have tried to correct this and promote my Teacher’s legacy. His moral and human qualities are apparent in his “Espíritu y Vida en claro”, which you can read here.