The Diplomat
Queen Letizia will inaugurate on December 12 the new center of the Instituto Cervantes in Los Angeles, the city that is home to the largest community of Spanish speakers in the United States.
This was announced yesterday by the director of the institution, Luis García Montero, during the annual meeting of the Board of Trustees of the Cervantes Institute, which was held at the Royal Palace of Aranjuez, in Madrid, and was chaired by the King and Queen of Spain. The meeting included the presentation of the Ñ 2022 Award to Gabriele Morelli, Italian Hispanist philologist and professor at the University of Bergamo.
“On December 12, the Queen will inaugurate the Cervantes Center of Los Angeles, a new center in the U.S. that joins the work we already do in New York, Chicago, Albuquerque and the Observatory of Spanish at Harvard,” said García Montero during his appearance before the press. This center is “an important challenge because of the place that Los Angeles occupies in international culture,” since “our center will be located next to Hollywood studios and will therefore be a point of reference to defend Hispanic culture in the U.S.,” he continued.
In addition, “in Los Angeles there are 12 million native Spanish speakers and, at the same time, California is an especially important place to defend technological development, scientific research and the role that Spanish should play in technology and science,” he added. “In a few years, the United States will already be the second country in the world, after Mexico, in terms of native speakers of Spanish, and today, although there have been some administrations that wanted to make Spanish a language of the poor, if we separate the Hispanics of the United States, they would make up the seventh largest economy in the world,” he concluded.
With the official inauguration of Cervantes Los Angeles, the number of U.S. cities with a Cervantes presence will rise to seven: the centers in New York (1995), Chicago (1996) and Albuquerque (2000), the Aula Cervantes in Seattle (2007), the Observatory of the Spanish Language at Harvard University (Boston, 2013) and the extension in El Paso (2021).
The creation of the Cervantes in Los Angeles was one of Luis García Montero’s main aspirations since he took office in 2018, but the project, which was intended to be launched at the end of 2019 or throughout 2020, had been delayed because of, among other things, the COVID-19 pandemic. The center, which will operate as a specialized technical body of the Consular Office, with the status of Consulate General of Spain, was approved by the Council of Ministers in July 2021. Luis García Martín, better known as Luisgé Martín (and former member of President Pedro Sánchez’s cabinet), will be in charge of directing the new center.
The Board of Trustees
During the meeting of the Board of Trustees, the King and Queen were accompanied by the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez; the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares; the Minister of Education and Vocational Training, María del Pilar Alegría; the Minister of Culture and Sports, Miquel Iceta; the director of the Instituto Cervantes, Luis García Montero; the members of the Board of Trustees of the Instituto Cervantes and the Ibero-American ambassadors accredited in Spain.
At the end of the meeting, the King and Queen offered a lunch to the trustees of the Instituto Cervantes, as well as to the Ibero-American ambassadors accredited in Spain and the rest of the authorities. Before the lunch began, in the Alabarderos Room, King Philip stressed to the attendees that “the data presented today by the Instituto Cervantes are optimistic and encouraging”. “We have not yet recovered to pre-pandemic levels, but the figures reflect a progressive recovery in the number of enrollments, students and Spanish courses around the world,” he continued. With “the almost 90 centers that the Instituto Cervantes has in more than 45 countries,” the institution is “an extraordinary benchmark of prestige for our language and culture,” he added.
The Board of Trustees is the body that guides the activities of the Institute. Under the Honorary Presidency of the King, the President of the Government exercises the executive presidency and the elected members are appointed from among prominent representatives of Spanish and Latin American literature and culture, the Royal Academies, universities and other social institutions, while the writers awarded the Miguel de Cervantes Prize for Literature (Cervantes Prize) are ex officio members.
Before lunch, the King presented the Ñ 2022 Award to Gabriele Morelli, Italian Hispanist philologist, professor at the University of Bergamo and specialist in the Generation of ’27 and the avant-garde, in recognition of his work in the dissemination and international promotion of the Spanish language. This honorary distinction, created in 2021 on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of Cervantes, recognizes the career of individuals – natural or legal, public or private – whose mother tongue is not Spanish and who have stood out for their work in the dissemination and international promotion of the Spanish language.