Carmen Amaya in Argentina and the United States: the international breakthrough

Two films released in 1936 changed the course of the life of the greatest bailaora who ever lived. In La hija de Juan Simón Carmen Amaya appears in a supporting role; in María de la O she carries the picture.

By then she was already La Capitana. Her singing was drawing attention across Spain, but it was her dancing that was pulling ahead — to her father’s dismay. El Chino is said to have complained that she was ruining herself, when she was such a fine cantaora. The remark reached the flamenco scholar Alfredo Mañas and is recorded in José Manuel Gamboa’s Una historia del flamenco.

The year that transformed her career also transformed her country. On 17 July 1936 the military uprising began in Melilla. Within days it had spread to Ceuta, Tetuán, the Canary Islands and the mainland. Carmen was in Valladolid. She brought forward a planned trip to Portugal and found work at the Café Arcadia in Lisbon, alongside the pianist Manuel García Matos.

She wanted to go home. But with a long war ahead, she sailed for Buenos Aires instead, travelling with part of her family, the guitarist Pelao el Viejo, the dancers El Fati and Faico, the singer Anita Sevilla and García Matos. Days after arriving in Argentina she told an interviewer what a life it was: civil guards on land and sharks at sea.

Carmen Amaya in Argentina: four years on Calle Corrientes

Carmen Amaya landed in Buenos Aires on 9 December 1936. Three days later she opened at the Teatro Maravillas in a show billed as Las maravillas del Maravillas. The local press was immediately taken with her. By the second night the crowds at the box office were large enough that security had to intervene, as Inés García-Albi records in her biography of the dancer.

The family stayed four years, settling on Calle Corrientes — the theatre street. Carmen’s younger siblings went to school there until they were old enough to join the company.

Flamenco in exile: Spanish artists in wartime Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires filled with Spanish performers fleeing the Civil War, and the city put them on its stages. Rosario and Antonio, the Chavalillos Sevillanos, joined the Maravillas programme. For several years, flamenco in exile had one of its principal homes in Argentina.

“In this extraordinary 1937 season, Spanish theatre should be considered an Argentine intellectual activity,” wrote Joaquín Linares in La Nación.

Carmen kept touring Latin America. The portrait that hangs today at Tablao de Carmen dates from this period: painted in 1939 by Ruano Llopis, the Spanish-born Mexican artist best known for his bullfighting posters.

For two years the Madrid tocaor Ramón Montoya — a defining figure in twentieth-century flamenco guitar — travelled with her company. And it was in Buenos Aires that Carmen met Sabicas, one of the guitarists who would leave the deepest mark on her life, professionally and personally. Musically they understood each other at once. The romance lasted a few months, until El Chino refused to give his daughter’s hand to the man from Pamplona.

Carmen Amaya in the United States: from the Beachcomber to Carnegie Hall

In late 1940, after Argentina and a long run of South American tours, Carmen Amaya took New York. She came through the impresario Sol Hurok, who handled most of the flamenco artists who performed in the United States during the twentieth century — Paco de Lucía among them.

She opened at the Beachcomber nightclub in January 1941, and the room began drawing figures like Frank Sinatra and Greta Garbo. A year later she conquered Carnegie Hall, the stage that decides American careers. The New York Times called her “a tempestuous gypsy, overflowing with vitality”, in a review Gamboa cites in his history. Life magazine put her on its cover.

The most repeated Carmen Amaya story from these years has never been proven true: that she and her family were thrown out of the Waldorf Astoria for frying sardines. What is documented is that she danced at the White House three times for President Roosevelt, who is said to have wept when she finished dancing por alegrías.

The taranto and the trousers: what Carmen Amaya gave flamenco dance

It was in the United States that Carmen Amaya made two of her greatest contributions to the history of flamenco dance. She was the first woman to perform on stage in trousers, breaking with the gender roles of the flamenco of her time. And she was the first to dance por taranto, an austere palo that came out of the mining communities of Murcia, Jaén and Almería.

As Inés García-Albi explains in her biography, she had built the taranto in South America, working from a gitana rondeña by the tocaor Miguel Borrull, alongside whom she had learned her craft as a child in the bars of Barcelona. She danced it at her Carnegie Hall debut, to music by Sabicas and Maestro Palomo.

Other pieces she performed often in the United States were Embrujo del fandango, the popular song ¡Ay que tú! and Manuel de Falla’s El amor brujo, widely performed at the time.

Going home: the fear of ten bucks

Even as she toured the United States and South America, Carmen flew back to Buenos Aires often. She was in Montevideo when she learned that her father had died. It hit her hard; she shut herself away for two months in mourning.

She sold the Buenos Aires house and went back out on tour. And little by little, like so many Spaniards in exile, she began to consider going home. In a conversation recorded by García-Albi, she laid out her doubts:

— Because you’re afraid of Franco?

— No. A gitana on her own can handle Franco. It’s the bucks I’m afraid of.

— What bucks?

— Ten bucks is all they pay a dancer in Spain.

She went anyway. In 1947, eleven years after leaving, a seasoned professional now shaped by American ways of working, Carmen Amaya returned to Spain.