ABSTRACT
In the late 1920s, Federico García Lorca found himself fighting the public perception that he was the quintessential Andalusian poet of Spanish modernism, the author of a distinctive kind of popular poetry that gave voice to the underrepresented Romani people of Southern Spain. As early as January 1927, still before the first edition of his triumphant book of poetry Gypsy Ballads (1928), Lorca had expressed his discomfort about what he perceived as a “gypsy myth” (Obras 940) that might damage his reputation in the long run. In a letter to his close friend and fellow poet Jorge Guillén, Lorca affirmed that the gypsies were for him “a literary theme, nothing else,” and added, in a very avant-gardist fashion, that he “could equally be a poet of sewing needles or hydraulic landscapes” (Obras 940). Lorca feared that his identification with the Romani culture would render what he thought was an unfair image of him as an “illiterate, uneducated” (Obras 940) artist. Also in 1927, only a few weeks after writing to Guillén, Lorca ended a letter to the influential leftist author José Bergamín with a postscript that asked him to “stop considering me a gypsy, a myth that is more harmful to me that you could know” (Obras 955). The sensational success of his Gypsy Ballads in 1928 only reinforced Lorca’s uneasiness about his public persona, and became a factor of importance in his decision to leave Spain in the summer of 1929 to initiate a nine-month stay in New York. This stay was followed by a three-month stay in Cuba before returning to Spain in June of 1930.
