The Feast of Santiago Apóstol on 14th Street
The procession of the neighbourhood’s patron saint, held every July until the end of the 1980s.
Like the other immigrant neighbourhoods of Manhattan, Little Spain had its feast day. Its patron was Santiago Apóstol — Saint James, patron of Spain and of Galicia, from where so much of the neighbourhood had come — and every July the procession came out onto West 14th Street.
The route passed the shops and restaurants that made the block: Trocadero Valencia, Casa Moneo, La Iberia, Restaurante La Coruña. The annual festival was celebrated together with the church of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, in the years when La Nacional had come to count nine thousand members.
The Spanish answer to the feasts of Little Italy
New York knew the feast days of Little Italy. Little Spain’s was smaller and is almost entirely forgotten, but for the Spanish families of 14th Street it was the fixed point of the year — the day the neighbourhood was visible as a neighbourhood, out on the street rather than behind the doors of the Society and the shops.
It outlasted most of the businesses. The procession was still coming out in the 1980s, after Casa Moneo and La Iberia had gone and the Spanish colony had largely dispersed, and it was still being remembered into the 1990s.
The last procession
The documentary contains unpublished footage, and the video of the last procession of the Apóstol, filmed at the end of the 1980s. That recording exists in this film and nowhere else.
Francisco Santamaría — wearing an A Coruña pin on his lapel, from the city he had left more than fifty years before — is one of the witnesses who recalls the procession on camera.