Antena 3 Televisión, Informativos — Extended television report on the film and its research
Lourdes Maldonado, Antena 3 Televisión, Informativos
Antena 3’s Weekend News broadcast an extensive report centred on the film and its research. Antena 3 news segments are among the leading audiences in the Spanish television market.
Antena 3 Informativos, Weekend News. Report by Lourdes Maldonado.
The broadcaster
Antena 3 began test transmissions on 25 December 1989 and went on air nationally on 25 January 1990, as the first nationwide private television channel in Spain. Until then Spanish television had been the state broadcaster and the regional channels alone. Antena 3 is today the flagship channel of the Atresmedia group, and its news service is one of the two that set the national agenda.
That is the scale of the slot this film was given. A Weekend News report is not a cultural listing; it is a segment in the main national bulletin, watched by an audience that had never heard of the neighbourhood the film is about.
What the report was about
The segment was built around Little Spain: A Century of History and the research behind it — the Spanish quarter that stood at the west end of 14th Street in Manhattan, and the archive the film assembled to reconstruct it.
That quarter had its own commerce and its own institutions. Casa Moneo, the ultramarinos at number 210, supplied Spaniards across the five boroughs with what they could buy nowhere else. La Nacional, the Spanish Benevolent Society founded in 1868, stood at number 239. The church of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe held the baptisms, the first communions and the weddings in Spanish, and every July the procession of Santiago Apóstol passed along the street. Almost none of it survived the end of the century.
For a Spanish audience the story had a second edge: most of the people who built that neighbourhood had left Spain. The majority were Galicians and Asturians, and the shopfronts of 14th Street carried the names of the towns they came from.
The broadcast coverage
Antena 3 was not the only broadcaster to take the film up. On esRadio, the national radio station, the Academy Award-winning director José Luis Garci discussed it on Cowboys de Medianoche with Luis Herrero, Eduardo Torres Dulce and Luis Alberto de Cuenca. In New York, the City University of New York interviewed the director for Independent Sources.
Related
- Little Spain — clips and television
- esRadio — Cowboys de Medianoche
- CUNY TV — Independent Sources
- The history of Little Spain, Manhattan
- La Nacional — the Spanish Benevolent Society, 1868–2000
- All press coverage