The Diplomat
Queen Letizia will inaugurate next Tuesday, December 13, the Instituto Cervantes of Los Angeles. It is the first Cervantes center on the west coast of the United States, a country with 60 million Spanish speakers.
The Queen’s visit will begin on Monday, December 12, with a meeting with the heads of the Instituto Cervantes centers in the United States to analyze the current importance and growth prospects of Spanish in this country. The meeting will take place at the Los Angeles headquarters and will be attended by the director of the Institute, Luis García Montero, and the director of the Los Angeles headquarters, the writer Luisgé Martín, as well as the heads of Cervantes in New York (Richard Bueno), Chicago (Anastasio Sánchez), Boston (Marta Mateo) and Albuquerque (Silvia Grijalba) and the Observatory of Spanish at Harvard University.
Tuesday will begin with a press conference in which Luis García Montero and Luisgé Martín will report on the lines of work, objectives and other issues related to the center. The Queen will then arrive at Cervantes, where she will unveil a commemorative plaque, visit the various rooms of the building, located at 3375 Barham Blvd, and, in a classroom on the second floor, she will sign the center’s book of honor.
The inauguration ceremony will include speeches by the Secretary of State for Ibero-America, the Caribbean and Spanish in the World, Juan Fernández Trigo, and Luis García Montero. The ceremony will be completed with the screening of a video with a recorded message from filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, who will give his name to the Cervantes library. Also attending the inauguration will be the Spanish Ambassador to the United States, Santiago Cabanas; the Consul General of Spain in Los Angeles, Juan Carlos Sánchez Alonso, and local government officials. Afterwards, the Queen will have a brief informal chat with the guests, who will include personalities of Spanish-language culture (especially from the audiovisual world).
“With this first event, the Cervantes Institute shows its special interest in one of the main fields of Spanish-language culture on which it will focus its work in the Californian megalopolis: film and the audiovisual world,” the institution said in a press release. Precisely one year ago, the Queen inaugurated the Instituto Cervantes center in Dakar (Senegal), the first in sub-Saharan Africa.
With the official opening 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). California is the state with the largest number of Hispanics in the U.S., with more than 15 million, according to the Census Bureau.
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 inauguration of the Los Angeles center puts an end to “the anomaly of the absence of a Cervantes in California, land of progress,” as stated by the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, at the University of California (UCLA) on July 22, 2021.
