XL Semanal — “Los españoles que conquistaron Manhattan”
XL Semanal — 15 February 2015
Spain’s largest weekly magazine ran a feature on the film under the subhead “El documental ‘Little Spain’ retrata a los pioneros que llegaron a los EE.UU.” — the documentary ‘Little Spain’ portrays the pioneers who came to the United States.
It is a short piece, but it is the one that put the neighbourhood in front of the largest readership it has ever had in Spain, and it carries several details about the quarter that appear in almost no other account.
XL Semanal, 15 February 2015. Full page.
XL Semanal, 15 February 2015 — “Los españoles que conquistaron Manhattan” (full page, PDF)
Where the quarter was, and when
The magazine opens by fixing the neighbourhood in space and time.
“Little Spain. Así se llamó a la comunidad española radicada en el oeste de Manhattan desde finales del XIX hasta los setenta del XX. Abarcaba de la calle 11 a la 16, ocupando un sector del West Village y de Chelsea…”
“Little Spain. That was the name of the Spanish community settled in the west of Manhattan from the end of the nineteenth century to the nineteen-seventies. It ran from 11th Street to 16th, occupying a stretch of the West Village and of Chelsea…”
Eleventh to Sixteenth. The quarter is usually spoken of as 14th Street, because that was its spine, but it was five blocks deep and it ran across two neighbourhoods that today carry no trace of it.
The magazine dates the Galician settlement earlier than most accounts do: emigrants, it says, “especialmente provenientes de Galicia, empezaron a instalarse allí hacia 1850” — began settling there around 1850, nearly two decades before La Nacional was founded in 1868.
How they arrived: the merchant seamen
The most interesting passage in the piece explains the mechanism of the emigration, which was not what people assume.
“Muchos marinos mercantes llegaban a la Gran Manzana en transatlánticos como el Covadonga, muy popular en su época, y permanecían en la ciudad, enrolándose después en barcos estadounidenses.”
“Many merchant seamen arrived in the Big Apple on transatlantic liners such as the Covadonga, very popular in its day, and stayed on in the city, signing afterwards onto American ships.”
That is why the quarter sat where it did. The Chelsea piers were a few streets west, and a Spanish sailor who left his ship had the neighbourhood on his doorstep. Galicians and Asturians came that way in numbers, and the shops and restaurants of the quarter took the names of the ports they had left.
What the street looked like
The feature describes a quarter in which it was easy to find “librerías, cafés, restaurantes, locales que ofrecían productos españoles” — bookshops, cafés, restaurants and shops selling Spanish goods — and, the detail that fixes it best, cinemas whose marquees announced all spanish program.
Two photographs run with the piece. One is El Faro, which the magazine describes as founded in the West Village in 1927 by Galician immigrants and frequented by Marlon Brando. The other is a procession of the Asociación Hijas de María Inmaculada — one of the lay sodalities attached to the church of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, and a reminder that the religious life of the quarter was organised, not occasional.
The award
The magazine introduces the director as “reciente ganador del premio de la Asociación de Cronistas de Espectáculos de Nueva York al mejor documental” — recent winner of the Latin ACE Award for Best Documentary. The prize had been announced a fortnight earlier, and ABC had reported it on 2 February.
Related
- El Faro — 823 Greenwich Street
- The Latin ACE Award, 2015
- ABC — the ACE Award reported
- Galicians in New York
- 14th Street — Calle Catorce
- The history of Little Spain, Manhattan
- All press coverage