The Diplomat
The second day of the working visit of the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, took place yesterday in Los Angeles, where he promoted the role of Spain as a center of audiovisual production and took advantage of the upcoming opening of the Instituto Cervantes Center in Los Angeles to highlight the importance of the Spanish language as a creator of “indestructible ties between Spain and the United States”.
Yesterday began with a visit to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, administered by the California Institute of Technology, which manages NASA’s Mars exploration programs. During the visit, in which he was accompanied by the Mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, Sánchez highlighted “the important work that Spanish scientists, institutions and companies carry out in collaboration with NASA, in addition to the knowledge and cutting-edge technology that they contribute with their research”. Spain collaborates with NASA missions through scientific and technological institutions and organizations such as CSIC, INTA and CDTI, as well as a group of Spanish companies, and about twenty Spanish researchers and engineers work at JPL.
Later, Pedro Sánchez participated in the event Presencia del español y sus culturas en Estados Unidos, organized by the Cervantes Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) a week after the Council of Ministers announced the upcoming opening of the Cervantes Center in Los Angeles, the city with the most Hispanics in the United States.
During the event, the president highlighted the growing importance of Spanish in the United States, with “43 million native Spanish speakers, 11.6 million bilinguals, 15 million people with Spanish language skills and more than eight million students of Spanish at all educational levels.” “Spanish has ceased to be a foreign language in the United States and has become a native language,” he said.
Therefore, the language constitutes “a heritage on both sides of the Atlantic that belongs to all of us and that we have to protect together” and its “expansion in the United States gives it a formidable richness,” he continued. “Spanish is our best ambassador for trade, freedom and, of course, culture” and is, at the same time, “a language that is well suited to crossbreeding, that crosses well with other languages” and, therefore, “is perhaps the most lively language in the world,” he added.
The next Cervantes Center in Los Angeles “cannot be just another Cervantes Center,” he warned. “It will be the home of the Hispanic in the region” and will represent “a strategic commitment of the first order for the Government, a firm commitment to Spanish, to the value that our language and our culture transmit,” and an example of “the indestructible ties between Spanish and California and, therefore, between Spain and the United States,” he added.
At the same event, the director of the Instituto Cervantes, Luis García Montero, said that, although the institution is “present in 88 cities around the world, it is especially important to have a strong presence in the United States,” especially in California and Los Angeles, “a bilingual city since its birth in 1781”. For her part, Professor Barbara Fuchs, recently awarded by Cervantes with the first Ñ Prize for the international dissemination of the Spanish language, said in perfect Spanish that Spanish is “not so much a minority language as a discriminated language, despite its potential in the region,” so that “now that UCLA has had the feat of opening a university where at least 25% of students identify themselves as Latino, we are at the perfect time to promote together all the variants of Spanish and all the cultures it represents.
At the end of this event, the President of the Government -who is traveling accompanied by the Minister of Industry, Trade and Tourism, Reyes Maroto- was interviewed live by the television channel CNN en Español and held a meeting with the CEOs of major investors in the audiovisual sector, such as Netflix, HBO, Disney, Warner and Activision, at Universal Studios, where he took the opportunity to promote Spain, Audiovisual Hub of Europe, a government initiative framed in the Digital Spain 2025 agenda.
