President Sánchez speaks with Gene Block, president of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). ETIENNE LAURENT / EFE
Pedro Sánchez has advanced one step further in a "promise acquired" in 2018 during his first official visit to the United States.
The Prime Minister announced this Thursday during an official visit to California that the Instituto Cervantes in Los Angeles will soon open.
This will mean the arrival of the institution, which already has six centers in the country, to the west coast and specifically to a city with 48% Hispanic population.
"We will correct the anomaly that is the absence of a Cervantes in California," said the president during a visit to the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA).
Sánchez has announced that the council of ministers recently approved the budget for the center, which will open its doors in 2022.
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The new center will reinforce the “strategic commitment” to the Spanish language, the second most widely spoken in the country by 60 million people. In four decades, the United States will be the nation with the most Spanish speakers in the world only behind Mexico, Sánchez recalled. Mexicans have been complicit in the arrival of Cervantes in Los Angeles, a city that spoke Spanish long before adopting English. The consulates of Spain and Mexico in the city are looking for the building that will house the institution if the government of Mayor Eric Garcetti, another ally of the project and who did not attend the event today, cannot contribute a site. Sánchez has indicated that the center will become a "home of the Hispanic" for the region.
The arrival of Cervantes in California, the president believes, means more than an institution for teaching Spanish. It is also a boost to "the values transmitted by our culture and our language", shared by 490 million people, a number that grows to 585 million if the people who are studying it are added. The dignification campaign is particularly important in places like the United States, where the language and its speakers suffered four years of disdain from Donald Trump and his nativist policies.
It is also a matter of geopolitical relevance. The Council of Ministers of July 13, when the budget line for downtown Los Angeles was approved, described the institute's presence in the United States as "reduced". The Cervantes only has centers in New York, Chicago, Albuquerque, a classroom in Seattle, and a Spanish observatory at Harvard University. The budget allocated for the first year of the Los Angeles center is 1.1 million euros.
Part of the work to dignify Spanish has a recent antecedent in El Paso, the Texas border city. The Cervantes opened an extension of its New Mexico center there in June, which will allow them to work on creating a Hispanic identity in a town where 83% of its population speaks Spanish. This Thursday, from Los Angeles, the director of the institute, the poet Luis García Montero, recalled the exile in this city of Luis Cernuda, who taught at UCLA from 1960 to 1963 and whose passionate writing in defense of Benito Pérez Galdós was “ to confront the hostile jingoism of supremacist identities ”.
Also participating in the UCLA event was the Hispanicist Bárbara Fuchs, who was the first winner of the Ñ Award for her work to disseminate the language. Fuchs, a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, has studied cultural production in Europe between the 15th and 17th centuries and has supervised for several years the translation of various texts that had never before been available in English and adapting them at the Theater Scene festival Classic, founded in 2018 and the first of its kind on the West Coast. "The past is not conservative just for being past," said Fuchs, who will soon receive the award from King Felipe. García Montero said that the academic look back "has allowed us to learn a lot about our theater, the benefits and difficulties of multiculturalism, relations with Anglo-Saxons,the picaresque and the presence of women ”.
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