This work proposes a reflective reading of the Spanish migratory phenomenon in New York City through the lens of General Systems Theory (GST). Drawing on the foundational contributions of Ludwig von Bertalanffy and on the ecological translation that Urie Bronfenbrenner offered to human development, the text moves across three analytical planes: the genealogy of systemic thought in Sections 2 and 3, the history of Spanish migration as a field of application in Section 4, and the examination of contemporary conditions of vulnerability and resilience in Sections 5 through 7. Section 4 examines in particular the formation and disappearance of Little Spain on Fourteenth Street in Manhattan as a process of construction and erosion of community resilience infrastructure. The central hypothesis holds that the resilience and vulnerability of migrant communities are emergent properties of the system, not individual attributes, and that any effective intervention must operate on the adaptive architecture of the receiving system. The framework's equifinality explains how historically distinct migratory profiles, the Republican exile of 1939, the economic worker of the 1960s, and the E-2 visa professional of 2018, converge on the same systemic state of vulnerability when the receiving system lacks an operative enclave, with direct consequences for the mental health of the communities affected. The correspondence between systemic predictions and documented historical and contemporary evidence constitutes the central analytical contribution of the work.
Yuhina ML (Fri,) studied this question.