„Als hätte es auf mich gewartet“ — Costa Blanca Nachrichten interviews Arthur Balder
Anne Goetzinger, Costa Blanca Nachrichten, Nr. 1436, 24 June 2011
On 24 June 2011 the German-language weekly Costa Blanca Nachrichten, published in Alicante for the German community of the Spanish Mediterranean coast, ran its Thema der Woche — topic of the week — on Little Spain. The interview was conducted by Anne Goetzinger and ran under the headline „Als hätte es auf mich gewartet“: as if it had been waiting for me.
This is the earliest extended interview about the project. It was published several years before the film reached Spanish screens, while the first part was, in the paper’s phrase, only just „im Kasten“ — in the can.
How the film began
The paper asked what had taken him from Alicante to New York.
„Ich kam nach New York, weil ich dem Geist der spanischen und deutschen Emigranten zu Beginn und Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts nacheifern wollte.“
“I came to New York because I wanted to emulate the spirit of the Spanish and German emigrants of the early and middle twentieth century.”
The account of how he found the subject is the most quoted passage in the piece, and it explains the headline. He was living at 100th Street and Broadway and taking the subway down towards Chelsea every day. It always stopped at 14th Street.
„Ich lief den Block zwischen den Avenues 7 und 9 ab, da war es unvermeidlich, auf die heute nur noch wenigen Zeugnisse von dem zu stoßen, was einst das spanische Viertel von Manhattan war. Eines Tages betrat ich dann die Spanish Benevolent Society, und ab diesem Moment nahm die Idee Form an.“
“I walked the block between Seventh and Ninth Avenues, and it was impossible not to come across the few traces left of what had once been the Spanish quarter of Manhattan. One day I walked into the Spanish Benevolent Society, and from that moment the idea took shape.”
The Spanish Benevolent Society was La Nacional, founded in 1868 and still standing at 239 West 14th Street.
On the emigration itself
Asked whether the Spanish emigrants differed from those of other nations, Balder described a community that began from nothing and found its footing alongside the Irish and the Italians around the Chelsea piers, until it ran its own businesses and had its own cultural centre on 14th Street. He called Little Spain „eine unbekannte Episode in der Geschichte der Straßen von Manhattan“ — an unknown episode in the history of the streets of Manhattan.
The interview also gives the numbers that frame the whole story. Drawing on the Ellis Island records, he put the peak at around 40,000 Americans of Spanish origin; by 2011, he said, no more than 5,000 were registered with the Consulate General in New York for the entire state. The Spanish emigration, in his account, was marked by its attachment to its own roots and by the need to return home sooner or later.
The archive, stated in 2011
What is striking, reading the piece back, is that the claim the film has been made on ever since was already there in 2011, before anyone had seen it. Asked when audiences would see Little Spain on a cinema screen, he answered that the greatest value of the film lay in the images showing the streets of the quarter with the signs of its Spanish shops — and that the most important of those images would be seen in this documentary and nowhere else, the producers holding exclusive rights to the archive material.
That is still the case. See The Archive.
The interview closes on what he was shooting next: a documentary on the painter José Manuel Ciria.
Read the original
Costa Blanca Nachrichten, 24 June 2011 — the full newspaper page
Related
- La Nacional — the Spanish Benevolent Society, 1868–2000
- 14th Street — Calle Catorce
- The Archive
- Arthur Balder, director
- All press coverage