ABC — “Little Spain en Nueva York”
José María Carrascal, ABC (Opinión, national edition, Spain) — 5 January 2015
Writing in his Postales column on the opinion pages of ABC, the veteran New York correspondent José María Carrascal devoted his first column of 2015 to Little Spain and to this documentary.
Carrascal sets the neighbourhood on 14th Street, between Sixth and Eighth Avenues, against an earlier Spanish enclave he had known personally — the one around Cherry Street, at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, which counted 1,723 registered Spaniards in the 1940s and whose restaurant Castilla, owned by a Galician, drew exiled politicians and Franco’s ambassadors alike. Carrascal ate there himself as a correspondent. That block was demolished to make way for public housing.
He then turns to the 14th Street enclave and to the founding of the Spanish Benevolent Society there in 1868 — the organisation that came to be known as La Nacional — which insured its members against misfortune in a country whose social provision lagged far behind Europe’s.
Of the film itself, Carrascal writes that Arthur Balder presents “un trabajo minucioso y extenso” — a meticulous and extensive piece of work — and calls it “el mejor regalo que me han hecho estas Navidades”: the best gift he received that Christmas.
ABC, Opinión, 5 January 2015. Full page.
ABC, 5 January 2015 — “Little Spain en Nueva York” (full page, PDF)
In the author’s words
“Allí nació, en 1868, la Spanish Benevolent Society, que aseguraba a sus socios contra las desgracias que pudieran ocurrirles en un país donde la seguridad social está, aún hoy, mucho más retrasada que en Europa. La sociedad pasó a llamarse La Nacional.”
José María Carrascal, ABC, 5 January 2015
Carrascal (1930–2021) was one of Spain’s best-known journalists and ABC’s long-serving correspondent in New York. He returned to the subject a month later, on 2 February 2015, when the film won the ACE Award for Best Documentary.