2023-04-28 22:30:25
There are very rational words that make you think and others that emanate from the heart and make you feel. As director of the Cervantes Institute, Luis García Montero (Granada, 1958) observes them all, because he knows that words can also be used to manipulate society. As a committed poet, the widower of Almudena Grandes cannot see reality except through his poetry and humanist heart. On Thursday he took his poetry for a walk through the Harvard gardens, on a spring afternoon in which 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 in the oldest and most prestigious university in the United States, which this Thursday celebrated its first decade in the study of the Spanish language through the American melting pot where all cultures melt. He could have limited himself to talking about the temperature of a language whose evolution he is proud of “with no room for complacency,” he warned. The authorities like to fill their mouths with 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 delayed by the growth of the Mexican population and the dispersion of immigrants in the US, where “we lose 30% of native speakers from one generation to another,” explains García Montero in an interview. Only 28 million of those Hispanics speak it as their first language, most of them “worse than very good,” they acknowledge in the most condescending surveys. «There is a world that invites the return of authoritarianism and fascism both in Europe and in America» The seed of hatred and marginalization that associates them with a language of the poor makes many families prefer that their children only speak English, while they are the most educated of Anglo-Saxon origin who can afford the luxury of bilingualism and swell the eight million Spanish students in the country, distributed at all educational levels. The Spanish, García Montero solemnly reports, is increasingly open and less localized within the US, it has more economic weight and therefore more respectability, since by itself the Hispanic population could be the eighth largest economy in the world. That’s where the good news comes in. There is more need to include the language of Cervantes on official forms and billboards, where the Anglo-Saxon arrogance continues to treat it as a subordinate language that it portrays with misspellings and nonsense phrases half translated from English. The Harvard Observatory brings prestige to Spanish and turns the language of these minorities into an intellectual reference. What really worries the poet and director of the Cervantes Institute is the progress 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”, and for this reason he believes that the task of the Instituto Cervantes is to transmit to them a heritage of which they can feel proud and to export the image of Spain “as a benchmark democracy. He went to speak about this before the select audience that awaited him on Thursday at Harvard, to share his concerns about today’s world, “where something as fundamental as democracy is in danger,” he warned circumspectly. He was not talking about the imperfections of democracy, “which there have always been,” he clarified, but about a world “that invites the return of authoritarianism and fascism, both in Europe and in America.” With his usual courage, Cervantes’ squire did not avoid uncomfortable questions during the interview: “If Donald Trump returns to power, I have no doubt that the Spanish will be one of his victims,” he predicted. His re-election would seem so worrisome to the world that “the consequences that this has for the Spanish, no matter how serious they may be, take second place,” he said without hesitation. The attacks will give way to “the degradation of democracy” and “the replacement of truthful information by lies”, with all the repercussions that this and “his empire of hoaxes” will have on society, coexistence, the lack of respect and contempt of people. In this scenario, as close as the 2024 elections, Spanish could become a weapon at the service of the elites to create class differences and make things difficult for those who do not want to participate in the idea that power wants to establish. If Cervantes had to confront the author of the «fake news» in the hoax war, «he would demand freedom, a compassionate gaze on the weak and the victims, and 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 abuses and inheritance with which to empower the marginalized. That is the roadmap to launch darts at the empire of autocrats from the heart of Cervantes.
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