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  • Interview with Luis García Montero. When they say that in Spain there is no democracy I say: 'One moment, one respect' "
  • A year as a director. "We must promote the prestige of Spanish to be the language of science and technology"
  • The new objective of the Cervantes Institute: Expanding Spanish for Africa before the brake in Europe and the US

The Cervantes Institute will finally have a headquarters in the city with more Spanish speakers in the United States and the second worldwide with more Mexicans: Los Angeles. On Monday, the director of the organization, the poet and professor Luis García Montero, confirmed that the project in the city of southern California, the fifth American geographical point in which the Cervantes will be present, is getting closer to being a reality after New York, Chicago, Albuquerque and Harvard (Massachusetts).

The intention is to inaugurate the headquarters in the last quarter of 2020 and to specify in these days the exact location, predictably in the center of the city. He has the support of the mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti , who expressly requested Pedro Sánchez, the Spanish president, a Cervantes for a region with more than 8.3 million Latinos after his last visit to the Californian city in September of the year past.

García Montero took advantage of the trip to the west coast to make it clear that his mission at the head of the institute is to protect the Spanish language against the xenophobic and exclusive current that has been installed in the country by the current president. "Trump believes that diversity is a threat to the United States, and that clashes with reality," he said in a telephone interview with EL MUNDO.

That is none other than the manifest growth of the Quevedo language in the first world power: second country by number of speakers in the world after Mexico, and a projection of 120 million Hispanics by mid-century, according to García Montero . " Against that there are those who react trying to break something that is typical of the US , which is its cultural richness and diversity. It is an offense not only to the Spaniards, but to the Americans themselves who are bilingual and have Spanish as their mother tongue."

The Grenadian believes that Los Angeles, with a metropolitan area with more than six million Hispanics, is an ideal place to combat "some policies that try to humiliate the Hispanic world, despise Spanish and impose English as the only prestigious language, " recalling Trump's decision to end Spanish on the White House website as one of the first measures he took.

"Many closed, supremacist identities are emerging in the world that try to put languages ​​and cultures in the debate of conflict and tension," he said. "For example, Trump is trying to recover policies that had been carried out in the Hispanic states in the 19th century, trying to erase Hispanic memory ."

He also advocated ending the idea that the best version of Spanish comes from Spain because it is the place of origin of the language. "The vigorous unity of a language with so many millions of speakers can only be sustained in respect for nuances, " he added. "No one can be considered the owner of a language nor can it be said that Spanish is spoken badly in other parts of the world."

The poet awarded with Federico García Lorca, Loewe and the National Poetry Prize recalled that he himself suffered teasing for being Andalusian. " They laughed at me because I ate those eses. Then I learned that Spanish is spoken in a different way , that you don't have to try to impose but learn to respect yourself."

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