Artur Balder's Little Spain offer us a neglected, often forgotten, seemingly incidental part of the history of Spain and New York. They converge in the form of Spanish immigrants to the city, a place where, as the song goes, "if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere." Balder documents their attempt to make it as Americans while retaining their Spanish identity -- to establish a spiritually homogeneous Spanish community in a city known for its heterogeneity and materialism. Do they succeed? Do they Americanize even as they remain Spanish in spirit? New York is the quintessential center of the proverbial American multicultural "melting pot." The Spanish immigrants to New York are not the conquistadors and colonizers of imperial Spain, but humble settlers in an imperial America.
Do the American and Spanish merge into a Spanish-American? Balder's film suggests they do and don't: they remain separate and insular in their New York neighborhood even as they work and prosper in the larger American society epitomized by New York. It is this display of the ambiguity -- not to say uncertainty -- of the Spanish-American identity that is the most striking feature of Balder's film to me: Catholicism, Spain's religion, and American secularism, are shown to function together, seemingly seamlessly yet implicitly at odds. The New York Spanish Americans remain deeply if conventionally Catholic, as Balder's attention to their church-going and Catholic clergy suggests, even as they display their Americanism by way of parades. They seem more like joiners than individuals in Balder's film, yet their individuality resonates beneath their Catholic and American uniformity, suggesting they are unconsciously in conflict about their dual-identity. They are neither unequivocally Spanish nor unequivocally American -- it is less clear what it means to be unequivocally American (unless it means to be a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) than to be unequivocally Spanish, however much Spain has been at odds with itself since the Spanish Civil War, and in decline since it lost its empire. Balder's Spanish Americans are incompletely American, for their hearts seem to belong to Spain wherever their bodies are. Balder invites us to wonder whether their Americanness is a superficial gloss on their Spanishness, unessential to it yet necessary, as a sort of a old, reliable emotional anchor, if they are to survive and prosper in the difficult brave New World of ever-new New York.
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