There are 400 million people who speak Spanish worldwide, mainly in Spain and South America. There are over 30 million Spanish-speaking people in the United States, especially in California, Texas, Florida and other border states.
For those who love pop culture, Spanish is incidentally also the native tongue of sultry singer-actress Jennifer Lopez, Penelope Cruz, the beautiful Spanish actress and girlfriend of Tom Cruise, Antonio Banderas, Ricky Martin, the Iglesias family of singers, Christina Aguilera, Gloria Estefan and more. It is also the lingua franca of Latin American beauty queens, who hail from countries like Venezuela, and who dominate the Miss Universe, Miss World and other beauty pageants.
In January last year, IBM and its Lotus subsidiary invited Filipino writers to attend its "Lotusphere" conference. During the Northwest flight stopovers in Los Angeles and Dallas, there were so many Spanish-speaking people at the airports. At the conference in Orlando, Florida, there were again many Spanish-speaking. A New York Internet entrepreneur noted that when one goes to Miami, it’s like going to a foreign country, because of the many Spanish-speaking people there.
What ultimately convinced me to enroll at the Instituto Cervantes was a conversation with the late Eric Catipon, Philippine Star’s Lifestyle Sub-editor, during a recent trip to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) with several journalists. At the Zayed Center for Coordination and Follow-Up Political Cooperation-Arab League in Abu Dhabi, the Philippine media delegation had a dialogue with several Arab scholars from the UAE, Egypt, Lebanon, Algeria, Syria and others. When Eric met with the Arabs from former French colonies, he impressed the forum by talking with them in fluent French for about 20 minutes. When I told Eric that I wanted to learn another language, too, he suggested that I check out the schedule of classes at Instituto Cervantes and that we enroll together in June, after his planned one-month vacation to Spain.
Unfortunately, Eric died just when I had contacted Instituto Cervantes director Javier Galvan Guijo and inquired about their class schedules. Due to his sudden demise, I enrolled by myself and attended my first class, which coincidentally, was on the same day that Eric was cremated.
Instituto Cervantes is a worldwide non-profit organization founded in 1991, with Spanish monarch Juan Carlos I as its honorary president. In Asia, there is only one Instituto Cervantes. It is in Manila, with its center located at an elegant five-storey building at the corner of Leon Guinto and Estrada Streets in Malate, Manila, just a few steps away from St. Scholastica’s College and De La Salle University. Its library has over 26,000 items in various media, and it regularly holds free film showings of popular Spanish-language movies.
My classmates Carlo and Carlos, both students, giggled when they pointed out that many of the famous Spanish films shown at the center are classified "For Adults Only."
In my class, there are only 11 students and we have a very talented Manileño professor in the person of Salvador "Budj" Malig, who had earned his master’s and doctorate degrees in Spain. He conversed only in Spanish and would enliven our class with endless conversational exercises. He makes learning Spanish not a chore, but fun and intellectual adventure.
Apart from learning the rudiments of the languages, we also learned that the name of Alma Moreno means dark soul, that the name of bold actress Piel Morena means dark skin, and that the surname of designer Rene Salud means health. A lot of Tagalog words are actually wrong or are in pidgin Spanish, such as siempre which means forever. Bulsa, which is bag in Spanish, becomes pocket in Tagalog. In fact, bulsillo is Spanish for pocket.
The objective of Instituto Cervantes is the promotion of teaching, knowledge and use of the Spanish language. Unfortunately Spain, during its colonial era, did not encourage the teaching of the Spanish language to Filipinos. Thus, we are markedly different from the 20 former colonies of Spain with Spanish as their official language – Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Guinea Ecuatorial, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Uruguay and Venezuela.
Ever since I first read the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude by Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, I told myself that I would someday learn the Spanish language and read this great work in the original Spanish version, Cien Años de Soledad for which Marquez won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.
His novels and short stories remind me so much of Philippine society, with eerily similar socio-political, cultural and moral problems. This is because Colombia and the Philippines are former Spanish colonies. Novelist William Kennedy, in his book review of One Hundred Years of Solitude said that it was "the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race."
Another outstanding writer whose eloquence and literary talent are remarkable was the Argentinean Jorge Luis Borges, especially his unforgettable seven-page short story "The Secret Miracle."
Other eminent Spanish-language writers, who had immeasurably enriched world literature include Cervantes of the masterpiece Don Quixote, Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, the poet Pablo Neruda, Jose Lezama Lima, Jose Donoso, Isabel Allende and many others.
Learning a new language is an exciting intellectual adventure and opens up a whole new cultural world. In learning the Spanish language, we will not only better understand the heart and soul of Spain, the vast and diverse continent that is South America, the fast-growing Hispanic communities of the United States, but it will also link us to the country’s colonial history as recorded in archival records and in the literary works of Filipino writers like national hero Dr. Jose Rizal.