¡Olé!: Flamenco in the Bronx

With Nelida Tirado performance

Mar 15, 2014 @ 6:00pm

Recently there was an exhibit at the New York Public Library called, 100 Years of Flamenco. It included beautiful photos of the greatest dancers that have graced New York’s stages and were the toasts of the dance world. However, one significant point that it left out was the grassroots perspective on the art of flamenco. There was another world of flamenco far away from the professional dance world of midtown Manhattan. The exhibit excluded the other side of her experience here in New York. Of course, the exhibit included the legendary Carmen Amaya, whose career changed the face of the genre. Yet the Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Mexicans and Spaniards who resided in neighborhoods like Little Spain (west 14th Street), Brooklyn Heights, El Barrio (East Harlem) and the Bronx, saw her fiery dances on the stages of their neighborhood theaters, where they also saw the latest Mexican movies and the other forms of la farándula (the show business arts)—from vocalists to comedians to trio music.
Flamenco was an inspiration for many— photo studios in places like East Harlem had rolls of film of headshots and promo photos with young performers dressed in flamenco costumes. Meanwhile, the Spanish community here in New York would host large flamenco shows at their social clubs. During the 20th century, immigrants from Spain created footholds in different parts of the city: Galicians and Basques lived on the Lower East Side and Greenwich Village; Andalusians lived in Brooklyn. Like their counterparts among other immigrant groups, they created clubs and organizations that reflected the regions they came from, such as El Centro Asturiano and La Casa Galicia (located on E. 11th St. in the building that we know as Webster Hall). If you look through the archives of these organizations you will see images of flamenco performed on stages and at events. It was incredibly shocking that the NYPL exhibit left out one performer in particular: Lola Flores. I don’t think I’ve ever come across a Puerto Ri- can household from my father’s generation that hadn’t heard the music of Lola Flores; she is the most likely reason Puerto Ricans a generation or two ago were introduced to flamenco. It was Dolores Flores Ruiz from Jerez de la Frontera, known as “Lola de España” who bought Spain, as imagined through flamenco, to the stages of Latino neighborhoods throughout New York City.