In the context of Hispanidad, it is worth leaving Spaniards to their nitpicking over whether their official language should be called "Castilian" or "Spanish." Irrelevant fuss for the 660 million Spanish speakers scattered across four continents. Strictly speaking, Castilian is limited to Castile and its surroundings. The rest – Hispanic Americans, Chicanos, Equatoguineans, Sahrawis, Moroccans, Filipinos, and Canarians if pushed – speak Spanish. Recognising this would be appropriate. Do Mujica Lainez, Otero Silva, or Juan Rulfo write like Baroja, Cela, or Delibes? Preserving their uniqueness, Spanish, today the second most spoken language on Earth, is a plural speech, with various idioms and accents, the result of mutations arising from the communicative needs in the forging of each people, and an evident sign of its vitality.
However, the carpetovetonic orthodoxy persists in its blindness, reluctant to recognise the unique stamp that our language acquires in certain areas of its vast physical and human geography. In bookstores in Paris or London, the interested reader finds books by African, Indian, and Caribbean authors written in French or English. The intellectual production of Angolan, Mozambican, Cape Verdean, or Brazilian writers is not lacking in Portuguese bookstores, including the most critical exponents of the odious colonial system imposed by the Salazarist "Estado Novo"; and in those former colonial powers, postcolonial studies are well established. But it is arduous to find the original creation of natives from the glorious Spanish empire in Madrid and Barcelona. Who knows Manuel Zapata, Lucía Charún, or Quince Duncan, genuine exponents of "Negrismo" in Spanish?
It is useless to deny diversity. And it may be unfair, counterproductive. Hispanidad should, in this century, integrate without "maternalism" all the voices that comprise it, transcending neo-imperialist rhetoric consecrated by the Francoist ideology that still permeates certain minds. It has ceased to be a private preserve of peninsulars and their South American diaspora, as not only the Creoles think, feel, and express themselves in Spanish. Only in this way will it be possible for its revitalisation as a space for reflection and a territory of encounter for all the people and nations that make up that cultural mosaic, united by History and other related ties.♦
