La Nacional – The Spanish Benevolent Society of New York, 1868–2000
The institution at 239 West 14th Street that gave Little Spain its centre, and the building where this documentary was researched.
In the autumn of 1868 a small group of Spaniards met in a storefront at 151 Bowery, in Lower Manhattan, and founded the Sociedad Benéfica Española de Socorros Mutuos — the Spanish Benevolent Society. It came to be known simply as La Nacional. Its purpose was stated plainly: to spread the spirit of fraternity and solidarity among Spanish and Hispanic-American residents of the United States.
The timing was not accidental. The colonial war in Cuba broke out that same year, and Spaniards fleeing the violence were arriving in New York with nothing. The Spanish Consulate in the city was being approached, with alarming frequency, by Spanish citizens who were sick or destitute and had nowhere to turn.
What the Society offered in those first decades was practical. It provided food and shelter to those who had just landed. It arranged medical care at a time when the United States had no social provision of any kind. It covered funeral costs so that Spaniards who died far from home were not buried as paupers. For working men with no savings and no family in the country, membership in La Nacional was the only insurance that existed.
The heart of Little Spain
Spanish emigration to the United States reached its peak between 1905 and 1920, and the community concentrated on 14th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. The block became known as Little Spain, and sometimes simply as Calle Catorce. La Nacional sat at its centre, at 239 West 14th Street, a building owned by the members themselves.
Around it stood the businesses that made the neighbourhood a neighbourhood: Casa Moneo, the Spanish grocery and gift shop that opened at 210 West 14th Street in 1929; La Iberia, the dress shop; and the restaurants — La Bilbaína, Trocadero Valencia, Bar Coruña, Café Madrid, Mesón Flamenco, El Faro. Spanish was the working language of the street. The church of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe held masses, baptisms, first communions and weddings in Spanish, and the feast of Santiago Apóstol, the neighbourhood’s patron, brought a procession through 14th Street every July.
Across its more than one hundred and fifty years, La Nacional housed artists and writers as residents. According to sources of La Nacional, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel and Federico García Lorca were among those who stayed there at some point.
The Society was not only a relief organisation. It was a social and political space. After the Spanish Civil War, Manhattan filled with Republican exiles, and La Nacional held both them and supporters of the Franco government under one roof — an arrangement that was, by the accounts of those who were there, less than comfortable. Spaniards of very different periods and political temperaments passed through its rooms across more than a century.
Decline
Little Spain faded as its people dispersed. Families moved out to the other boroughs and the suburbs, Spanish emigration to the United States slowed and then stopped, and the storefronts changed hands. Casa Moneo closed. La Iberia closed. The church of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe on 14th Street was lost. The procession of Santiago Apóstol was still celebrated into the 1990s, and then it was not.
By the end of the twentieth century almost nothing of the neighbourhood remained visible from the pavement. La Nacional’s building was still standing, and the Society still had members, but the Spanish colony that had built it was gone.
The film, and how it was made
Between 2009 and 2010, Arthur Balder was artist-in-residence at La Nacional. He lived in the building on 14th Street while researching and filming, working through, among others, the Society’s own archive — hundreds of photographs and documents that had accumulated across more than a century and had never been assembled or shown.
Robert Sanfiz, who was president of La Nacional during those years, took part directly in the work. He appears in the film as an interviewee, telling the history of the Society himself, and he reads the voice-over. The institution’s own leadership narrates the record of the institution.
Trailer. Robert Sanfiz and other members of the Society on camera.
That is what separates Little Spain from every other account of this neighbourhood. It was not assembled from secondary sources. It was made inside the building, from the building’s own papers, with the people who were still there.
Arthur Balder and Robert Sanfiz at La Nacional during the making of the film.
Little Spain–La Nacional Way
In September 2026 the City of New York co-named the intersection of West 14th Street and Eighth Avenue as “Little Spain–La Nacional Way”, returning the neighbourhood’s name to the corner where it stood. The documentary was completed sixteen years before that street sign went up.