The Press Law of 1938
In 1938, beneath a sky heavy with the smoke of civil war, Spain learned how to systematically dismantle human thought. The weapon was not a bullet, but a document: the Press Law of 1938, engineered by Serrano Suñer. It was an eviction notice for the mind. Under its shadow, every written word required the state’s permission to exist. Outlets were suffocated without the right to appeal. Editors were removed like faulty gears, replaced by loyal Falangist hands.
But the regime did not just dictate what to omit; they dictated what to invent. They forced newspapers to print government propaganda verbatim. They measured headlines with cold rulers, commanding the layout of the front page. They curated the imagery, selecting only the precise, low angles that made Francisco Franco look majestic, carving an autocrat into a myth. To refuse was to invite financial ruin, the forfeiture of a printing license, or a sudden, quiet replacement.
When the regime looked at literature, they saw a mirror that needed breaking. Foreign works were not translated; they were rewritten. The heavy, honest realities of human suffering—suicide, abortion, critiques of the Church—were scraped away until only a hollow, sanitized compliance remained. And for the voices that spoke in Catalan, in Basque, in Galician? Total erasure. Their mother tongues were rendered illegal.
Franco’s troops marched into towns, entering libraries, schools, university archives, and private sanctuaries. They dragged books into public squares and lit them. People stood in the plazas, watching the ashes of their history drift into the dark.
Yet, they knew that to truly kill an idea, you must stop the heart that beat it into existence. Thousands of journalists, teachers, professors, and poets were hunted down. They did not just burn the pages; they buried the authors.
Decades later, the landscape changes, but the gravity remains. Thousands of miles away, my home university, Princeton, finds itself standing on its own fracturing shoreline. In May 2025, the university launched “Stand Up for Princeton”—an advocacy campaign born not out of luxury, but out of necessity. Led by President Christopher Eisgruber, it is a defensive wall built against a rising tide of federal pressure, hostile legislation, and funding cuts designed to starve elite American higher education.
The modern friction points are drawn in ink and numbers, yet they carry the same weight of control:
The Freeze: The federal government paused hundreds of millions in research grants. For Princeton, this instantly locked away over $200 million meant for the frontiers of quantum science and artificial intelligence—leaving human curiosity frozen in a laboratory ledger.
The Tax: A proposed 21% excise tax on university endowments, a legislative attempt to chip away at the financial foundations of institutional independence.
The Scrutiny: Increased federal intervention under the guise of Title VI enforcement, transforming campus spaces into ideological battlegrounds over who has the right to speak, and where the boundaries of expression are drawn.
In his defense of the university, Eisgruber separated the noise from the signal, dividing liberty into two distinct truths:
Free Speech is the right of the citizen. It is the broad, chaotic latitude of the public square, governed by the Chicago Principles. It allows for the unformed, the offensive, and the raw to be spoken aloud, stopping only at the boundary of targeted harassment or the physical silencing of another.
Academic Freedom is the right of the scholar. It is not an permission slip for consequence-free rhetoric, but a sacred license to pursue objective truth. It is the right of the researcher to follow evidence wherever it leads—even if the destination enrages donors, politicians, or the public—beholden only to the rigorous peer review of their discipline.
Legally, Spain has healed from its past. Article 20 of the Spanish Constitution enshrines free expression as a fundamental right, aligned with the European Convention on Human Rights. The law says I am safe.
Yet, here I am. A century after the dark dawn of the Press Law, thousands of miles from the safety of my campus, facing the quiet, terrifying weight of threat.
I have never been a person of loud architecture. When the world fractures around me, I do not build a stage; I retreat into silence. I do not scream into the wind.
Instead, a year ago, I built a digital hearth. A blog. It was a quiet room where I poured my life experiences, my reflections, and the lessons I’ve gathered for my family, my friends, and the occasional professor who cared to look. For over a year, that room grew warm. People from corners of the earth I have never seen spent hours reading hundreds of pages typed with my own blood, sweat, and tears, looking through thousands of photographs I took to capture the light. It was a beautiful, fragile web of connection—a stranger writing to tell me they loved a photo, or that they, too, had walked those same cobblestones.
I am certain the Catalan, Basque, and Galician writers thought their words were beautiful, too. But when the darkness closed in, the lucky ones were left with a brutal geometry: continue writing and wait for the knock at the door, surrender their language to stay in the country, or flee into exile.
Thousands chose the horizon. Thousands buried their native tongues. Thousands were broken. Millions became ghosts.
Perhaps this is my long, lyrical confession that I am not cast from the same iron as the people of Spain. When they are pushed, they become a storm. They mount bicycles and paralyze Avenida Diagonal; they stack their bodies like stones to barricade the Sagrada Família. I tried, for a fleeting moment, to stand against the wind. But when you are thousands of miles away from everyone who knows how to say your name correctly, without a hand to hold, it does not feel like a protest. It feels like standing alone in a clearing, listening to the sound of a rifle clicking into place.
So, I am choosing the path of the old writers. I am hunkering down.
Those of you who have held this space with me are welcome down into the basement. We will keep a small lantern lit. But until the heavy footsteps pass on the street above, and until the army moves on—it is goodbye for now.
Con amor y enfadada desde el sótano,
