In the first three decades of the twentieth century, New York City emerges as a recurrent theme in Spanish literature. However, critical attention to the presence of this city in Spanish letters has been traditionally limited to the study of Diario de un poeta reciencasado (1916) by Juan Ramón Jiménez and Poeta en Nueva York (published posthumously in 1940) by Federico García Lorca. The wealth of popular novels and novellas published in this same period as well as the numerous travelogues where New York played a prominent role, have traditionally been dismissed due to their alleged lack of literary value. This is the case of Pruebas de Nueva York (1927) by José Moreno Villa, El crisol de las razas (1929) by Teresa de Escoriaza, Anticípolis (1931) by Luis de Oteyza, and La ciudad automática (1932) by Julio Camba. Departing from traditional aesthetic and structuralist analyses, I propose that this corpus provides an important insight into the cultural debate on modernity in early twentieth-century Spain. For my analysis, I will be drawing on key theoretical work in postcolonial and gender studies, particularly with relation to the nation. The application of these theories to close textual analysis of early twentieth-century Spanish New York narratives will unveil the pervasive use of the biopolitical criteria of ‘class’, ‘gender’, and ‘race’ by competing projects of national regeneration after 1898 in Spain, as well as the often disregarded connections between the Spanish crisis of national identity and the wider European context.