Guillermo Azabal
Los Angeles (USA), 11 Dec. The new Instituto Cervantes in Los Angeles (California, USA) will start operating on Tuesday with a clear audiovisual vocation and with the aim of promoting the link between Spanish and the film industry and technology.
The director of the new center, Luisgé Martín, receives EFE in his office at the new Cervantes headquarters, located near the Hollywood hills or what is the same in the world mecca of cinema, to talk about the projects that the institution, which lands in California five years after the announcement.
“We will implement courses that have that bias related to cinema, series or platforms,” says Martín.
Indeed, in a real declaration of intent, Martín will be accompanied next Tuesday at the inauguration by Spanish and Latin actors such as Eugenio Derbez, Kate del Castillo or María Valverde.
Queen Letizia, the general director of the Instituto Cervantes, Luis García Montero, and the director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Gustavo Dudamel, will participate in the official act of opening and unveiling of the plaque.
The day before, the Queen of Spain will hold a working meeting in the city with the directors of the various Cervantes centers in the United States to “discuss broad lines of action”.
After Tuesday’s inauguration, Martín explains that they have various initiatives such as participating in the next edition of Comic-Con -the international comic convention in San Diego-, organizing film series and promoting a congress in Spanish for LGTBI writers.
In addition to promoting the link between cinema and the Spanish language, another of Cervantes’ vocations from Los Angeles will be to spread the culture that blends Hispanic and Anglo-Saxon, as happens on the streets of the city that welcomes him.
In this sense, one of its strategic axes will be to “give voice” to the cultural productions of all kinds that arise from this mixture in the US city with the largest Latin presence and, in turn, the second most populous in the country after New York .
Martín emphasizes that they will try to meet the cultural needs of the Hispanic population in general, and of the Mexican population in particular, working in collaboration with the Consulate General of Mexico and with the Casa de España in the said country.
And it is that the city of Los Angeles alone, given that the county of the same name is also made up of other municipalities with a Latino presence, has 925,000 people with Mexican roots out of a total of 3.9 million inhabitants.
This crossroads, together with the “strength of cinema and literature”, favors, according to the writer himself, an “even greater cultural scene than that of New York”.
The King of Spain, Felipe VI; the president of the Spanish government, Pedro Sánchez; o García Montero have highlighted in recent months the projection and influence that the new center will have.
For this reason it was “rare” that Cervantes did not have an office in Los Angeles.
“Rare, rare is the adjective (…) It comes late, but it comes”, jokes Martín.
Until now, the roster of the Instituto Cervantes in the United States consisted of its centers in New York, Chicago and Albuquerque -with an extension in El Paso-, as well as the Aula Cervantes in Seattle and the Observatory of Language Spanish at Harvard University (Massachusetts).
At 60, Martín, awarded the Herralde Novel Prize in 2020, embarks on a new career path outside the areas in which he has worked most of his career: the world of publishing and cultural management.
Martín intends to give the center his personal mark, but without losing sight of his great objective: “Let’s remember that Spanish is already a very powerful language within art, but we also want to link it to the audiovisual sector”. EFE extension
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