Queen Letizia of Spain inaugurated this Tuesday the headquarters of the Instituto Cervantes in Los Angeles, with the goal of not staying in its facilities but going out into the streets, neighborhoods and community colleges to teach Spanish, vindicate it and to promote the culture of the Spanish language, through literature, cinema and theater.
“Los Angeles is one of the most powerful cities with the greatest cultural strength. And geographically it’s a sprawling city with various communities. That is going to force us to have many Cervantes Institutes in Los Angeles”, said the novelist and writer Luisgé Martín (Luis García Martín), director of the Cervantes Institute in Los Angeles.
Therefore, he said that They are going to take to the streets and to the neighborhoods, from now on.
“We will go with our proposals to find people. We will increase our agreements with universities such as UCLA, USC, museums, galleries, and other cultural centers such as the French Lyceum”.
He pointed out that they will give special attention to community colleges and will offer courses for people and children who want to learn Spanish.
“We offer many workshops that teach interesting things in Spanish: how to interpret or dub a movie, how to cook, how to play tennis for third-graders or second generation who would get bored taking a conventional Spanish course”.
What is more, he revealed that they are going to work with companies and teach Spanish to doctors so that they learn to speak Spanish with fluency.
“In short, we had to be in Los Angeles, where a Cervantes Institute was needed.”
And he revealed that in the second semester of the year 2023 will be working fully as a project for the union of Spanish, anchored to the values of equality, tolerance, diversity and respect.
Another of his projects is to make a powerful book club; a congress of LGBT writers, and turning the Instituto Cervantes into a reference site for watching films in Spanish, Argentine, Mexican and Peruvian, among others.
The new Cervantes will pay special attention to the audiovisual industry. Its assembly hall should become “a temple to watch Spanish cinema”, where all the films that are released in Spain and other Spanish-speaking countries are publicized in private screenings.
At the suggestion of Queen Letizia, they will work to put the Hollywood Academy in contact with film academies in Spain and other countries.
“We will inaugurate the Pedro Almodovar Library, when the film director can come. This library will be focused on Spanish-American literature, children’s literature, a lot of film literature and above all annotated scripts, analyses, and some singular documents that differentiate it from other libraries.”
The director of the Institute Cervantes, Luis García Montero said that Los Angeles is a point of reference that the Instituto Cervantes wants to make since it was launched in New York, Albuquerque, Chicago, the Observatory for Spanish at Harvard University.
He pointed out that according to the studies of the Cervantes Institute, created in 2021, the United States is the second country in the world in Spanish speakers, after Mexico; and it is the second most spoken language after Mandarin Chinese.
“Besides, there is a lot of interest in Spanish in non-native sectors. More than 8 million 12 Millions of Spanish students in the world are in the United States. So it is essential to work and be present in the best way possible.”
He made it clear that Los Angeles is essential because of the role that Hispanics have. “We proposed as an argument to the Spanish government – which is the main sponsor of the Instituto Cervantes budget – that it is important to bet on the future. It is not enough for us to say that we are the language of Cervantes, García Marquez, but that we are going to work with technological and scientific development from the perspective of the Hispanic world”.
Before inaugurating the Cervantes Institute, the Queen of Spain unveiled a commemorative plaque.
The director of the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra, Gustavo Dudamel, said that in a Spanish-speaking city like Los Angeles, it is very important to have the Instituto Cervantes, the foundation of our language.
“I think it is a space for those of us who speak Spanish and our identity. It’s a foundation in a way.”
The Secretary of State for Ibero-America and the Caribbean and Spanish in the World Juan Fernando Trigo, said that the inauguration in Los Angeles consolidates the expansion of Cervantes in the United States where it opened 33 years his first center, in New York.
His goal, he stated, is “to make Spanish a language of the first order” in all areas, something fundamental in the American city with the largest number of Hispanics.
“Today culminates an effort that began its journey in 2021, the beginning of a exciting and exciting path that will have the support of the population”.
Its doors, he concluded, will always be open to the entire city, helping to strengthen the bilateral relationship between the two countries
The opening ceremony was completed with the projection of a video in which Pedro Almodóvar shows his pride that the library of the Californian Cervantes will bear his name:
“It goes beyond what I could have dreamed”. And he added that to think that in it “someone picks up a book on Don Quixote, Almudena Grandes or Borges is the most beautiful thing that nobody can offer me”.
The new center of the Cervantes Institute is located in the 3024 on Barham Boulevard in the city of Burbank in Los Angeles County, in a two-story building that has five classrooms and a classroom of acts and a work team that will soon reach 8 people, in addition to the director.
