Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca

Federico García Lorca (1898–1936), born in fertile Vega de Granada, studied at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid where he formed close creative friendships with painter Salvador Dalí and filmmaker Luis Buñuel. Lorca captured the deep mystical folk soul of Andalusia—its flamenco songs (*cante jondo*), gypsy romances, and bullfighting rituals—in his bestselling 1928 collection Romancero gitano (Gypsy Ballads).

Visiting New York during the 1929 Wall Street Crash, Lorca wrote the surrealist masterpiece Poet in New York, attacking capitalist alienation and celebrating Harlem's Black culture. Directing the traveling university theater troupe *La Barraca*, he toured rural Spain staging classical plays for peasants before composing his immortal rural tragedy trilogy: Blood Wedding (Bodas de sangre), Yerma, and The House of Bernarda Alba. In August 1936, following Francisco Franco's fascist uprising, Lorca was arrested in Granada and executed by a firing squad in an unmarked ditch near Alfacar at age thirty-eight.