Spain and the United States - Real Instituto Elcano

CULTURAL RELATIONS, IMAGE AND ANTI-AMERICANISM 107
Spanish flag, a Greek sailor named Valerianos de Cephalonia, also known as
Juan de Fuca, sailed up the Puget Sound seeking the Northwest Passage. As a
result of his 1592 voyage, there are places called Fidalgo, López, Juan de Fuca,
Guemes, Rosario and Padilla. The exhibition charted the evolution of Spanish
attitudes towards knowledge, exploration and faith during three centuries of
Spain’s golden age, beginning with Columbus’ first voyage in 1492 and ending
with the signing of the Adams-Onis Treaty in 1819, which ceded Florida and
the Northwest Territories to the United States.
The Cervantes Institute starts with a big advantage in the United States: of
the roughly 190 languages spoken by the children of immigrants in schools in
areas such as New York, only Spanish is as universal as English. But the
Cervantes Institute has a global budget of only 60 million and 42 centres,
compared with the French Institute and Alliance Française, which has a budget
of more than 500 million and 430 centres around the world, even though the
French language is in decline (180 million native speakers worldwide
compared with more than 350 million Spanish speakers). The British Council
has 20,000 students in Spain alone, compared with 93,000 for the Cervantes
Institute worldwide (6,000 of them in the United States).
The general lack of resources is hampering Spain’s efforts. According to
Emilio Cassinello, a former Consul General in New York, “Given the size of
the United States, the operational capacity of official institutions with cultural
missions is painfully insignificant”. 3 Spain has nine consulates in the United
States, almost all in cities or states with a large Hispanic presence: New York,
Washington DC, Boston, Miami, Houston, New Orleans, Chicago, Los
Angeles and San Francisco, plus San Juan (Puerto Rico, where both Spanish
and English are the official languages). “Although this scarcity is a structural
fault of the Foreign Service, it is even more scandalous in the US – the leader
in practically all scientific, technological and cultural fields.” For example,
New York has to make do with $50,000 a year as its cultural budget and
Chicago around $3,000. Miami (both Spanish and English are official
languages in Miami-Dade county) gets $300,000.
The United States has a long history of Hispanism, which is generally
acknowledged to have started towards the end of the eighteenth century, when
a combination of hemispheric politics and history raised American awareness
of Spain. 4 In 1779, Thomas Jefferson, who drew up the Declaration of
3. See Spain and the Hispanics: A Strategic Project by Emilio Cassinello, (Elcano Royal Institute,
Working Paper 64, 2004, www.realinstitutoelcano.org/documentos/163.asp).
4. Before that, Garrat Noel published a textbook for the study of Spanish in 1751. The only available
English translation of Don Quixote was that completed in 1742 by the British scholar Charles Jarvis. This brief
history of Hispanism in the United States draws on Spain in America, The Origins of Hispanism in the United
States, edited by Richard Kagan (University of Illinois Press, 2002).