The Diplomat
The Council of Ministers yesterday approved the Royal Decree creating an Instituto Cervantes center in the city of Los Angeles, the city that is home to the largest Spanish-speaking community in the United States.
The current presence of the Instituto Cervantes in the United States is limited to its centers in New York, Chicago and Albuquerque, a classroom in Seattle, the Spanish observatory at Harvard and the recently created extension in El Paso, a “very small presence considering the geopolitical and demographic relevance of this country”.
For this reason, the Government decided yesterday, at the initiative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and at the proposal of the Ministry of Finance and Public Function – and after a report from the Executive Council on Foreign Policy (CEPE) – to create the new center in Los Angeles with the objective of promoting the Spanish language and the dissemination of Spanish culture on the West Coast of the United States, “where the Hispanic presence is especially significant”.
The new center is created “as a specialized technical body of the Consular Office, with the category of Consulate General of Spain,” and will depend organically and functionally on the Instituto Cervantes, which is responsible for its internal organization and budget.
The expenses arising from the opening, installation and operation of the center will be covered by the public body, allocated in the General State Budget Law 2021, and amount to 1,158,740 euros. However, according to the Government, the creation of the Instituto Cervantes center in Los Angeles “does not imply a net increase in the personnel costs of the public body Instituto Cervantes”, since the forecasts made in relation to the staff will be conditioned to the “relevant redistribution of vacant posts”.
The creation of the Cervantes in Los Angeles is one of the main aspirations of the director of the Instituto Cervantes, Luis García Montero, since he took office just three years ago, but the project, which was intended to be launched at the end of 2019 or throughout 2020, has been delayed because of, among other things, the COVID-19 pandemic. The United States has the fifth largest Spanish-speaking population in the world. Some 57.5 million Americans are Hispanic, nearly half of whom reside in the states of California and Texas.
