he Asturian presence in New York City has always been sporadic, never forming as continuously organized a community as in Cuba, Argentina, Tampa, West Virginia, or Pennsylvania. At the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th, according to New York-based Asturian writer Paquita Suárez-Coalla, some Cuban-Asturians arrived in New York via Tampa, and during the emigration of the 1960s, at the height of Franco's dictatorship, Asturians came who would later form part of the Centro Asturiano created in 1995. The Centro, which was located in Astoria (the similarities of the names are purely a coincidence), brought together some 30 Asturian families in order to be a point of reference for Asturians, Spaniards, and Latin Americans with ancestral ties to Asturias. According to Suárez-Coalla, it is very likely that most Asturian New Yorkers are at least familiar with the language, especially in its Amestao form, which mixes in Castilian. Recent Asturian cultural events were held at NYU, in the Espacio Culturas, in collaboration with the University of Oviedo. Suárez-Coalla moved to New York in 1994 and began to write in her native language here, at a Tertulia de Escritoras Dominicanas, a gathering for Dominican writers, in Flushing.