Mirrors, reflexions and shadows: Portuguese-Galician relations in the 1920s

Abstract

Renascença Portuguesa and Integralismo Lusitano were two Portuguese nationalist movements from the 1920s with an outstanding expression in the Iberian and Ibero-American spaces. They were responsible for political and cultural influences on Peninsular peripheral regionalisms, as well as those in Brazil and other Latin American countries. With its origin in the nineteenth century and becoming fully mature in the interwar period of the twentieth century, Galician nationalism used the arguments of language and culture to recover its identity. It was also able to create a genuine hermeneutics that would guarantee for Galician people their own government, educational system and the recovery of their history, literature, culture and popular traditions, indispensable urgings in the process of reinventing a nation. Accomplices and guides of a Galicia eager to be independent, Portuguese republican and monarchist nationalist movements were vital in the process of building/rebuilding the nation. The dialogue with Irmandades da Fala and Geração Nós would have been profitable, were it not for the Spanish civil war and the dictatorial Iberian governments that plunged the region into the shadows for more than fifty years.