‘If Donald Trump comes back to power, Spaniards will be one of his victims’

Date:

There are very rational words that make you think and others that come from the heart and make you feel. As director of the Instituto Cervantes, Luis García Montero (Granada, 1958) observes them all, because he knows that words can also be used to manipulate society. A committed poet, the widower of Almudena Grandes can only see reality through poetry and his humanistic heart. On Thursday, he took his poetry for a walk through Harvard’s gardens on a spring afternoon when the sun melted the rain into rainbow drops. The author of “El jardín extranjero” was in New England to take the pulse of our language at the Spanish Observatory, located at the oldest and most prestigious university in the United States, which this Thursday marks its first decade in the study of the Spanish fourth. language through the American melting pot where all cultures merge. He could have confined himself to talking about the temperature of a language he prides itself on evolving “without leaving room for complacency,” he warned. The authorities are happy to talk about the 60 million Hispanics who at this rate in 2060 will make the US the second Spanish-speaking country after Mexico. A figure that is periodically slowed down by the growth of the Mexican population and the spread of immigrants in the US, where “we are losing 30% of native speakers from one generation to the next,” explains García Montero in an interview. Only 28 million of those Hispanics speak it as their first language, most of them “worse than very well,” they admit in the most condescending surveys. The seeds of hatred and marginalization that associate them with a language of the poor mean that many families prefer their children to speak only English, while it is the most educated of Anglo-Saxon descent who can afford the luxury of bilingualism and join the country’s eight million Spanish students across all levels of education. The Spaniards, García Montero solemnly reports, are increasingly open and less localized in the US, have more economic weight and therefore more prestige, as the Latin American population in itself could be the eighth largest economy in the world. That’s where the good news comes in. There is a greater need to include Cervantes’ language on official forms and billboards, where Anglo-Saxon arrogance continues to treat it as a subservient language portraying it with misspellings and nonsense sentences half translated from English. The Harvard Observatory gives prestige to Spanish and makes the language of these minorities an intellectual reference. What really worries the poet and director of the Cervantes Institute is the advancement of “those who want to associate it with marginalization and contempt.” García Montero knows that Spanish is “much more than a vocabulary, it is a set of values”, which is why he believes that the task of the Instituto Cervantes is to transmit to them a heritage they can be proud of and to export it image of Spain “as a benchmark democracy. He went to speak about this before the select audience that awaited him at Harvard on Thursday, to share his concerns about today’s world, “where something as fundamental as democracy is in danger,” he cautiously warned He was not talking about the imperfections of democracy, “which have always been there,” he clarified, but about a world “inviting the return of authoritarianism and fascism, both in Europe and America.” Cervantes’ squire did not shy away from uncomfortable questions during the interview: “If Donald Trump returns to power, I have no doubt that the Spaniard will be one of his victims,” ​​he predicted. His re-election seems so alarming to the world that “the consequences this has for the Spaniards, serious as they are, fade into the background,” he said without hesitation. The attacks will give way to “the degradation of democracy” and “the replacement of truthful information with lies”, with all the consequences that this and “his empire of deceit” will have on society, coexistence, the lack of respect and the contempt of people. In this scenario, so close to the 2024 elections, Spanish could become a weapon at the service of the elites to create class divisions and make it difficult for those who do not want to participate in the idea that wants to establish power. If Cervantes had to meet the author of “fake news” in the hoax war, “he would demand freedom, a compassionate look at the weak and the victims, and he would reject superstition, because it is a disguise for lies.” The value of intelligence against superstition, the truth against the wall of superstition and culture as a weapon to expose wrongs and legacies to empower the marginalized. That’s the roadmap to launch darts into the realm of autocrats from the heart of Cervantes.
Source: La Verdad

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

Share post:

Subscribe

Popular

More like this
Related

2.48 per mille intus – Drunk man hits police officer in the face with his fist

Police officers found a drunk and extremely aggressive man...

Unemployment benefits & Co. – Kocher: AMS must promote digital communication

In the future, unemployment benefits must mainly be applied...

Only mobile light with you – young people were stuck in the dark on Traunstein

They probably underestimated the Traunstein. Four young people...