These days mark 400 years since the founding of what is now New York, which took place in the spring of 1624. It would be logical that the anniversary would be a cause for celebration, but it is going almost unnoticed. An exception is the sample titled New York before being New York, tiny exhibition that occupies just a corner of the lobby of the New York Historical Society, an elegant classical neo-Roman style building located in front of the west side of Central Park.
The exhibition includes maps, objects and documents of considerable interest, among them a letter in which an administrator of the Dutch India Company named Pieter Schagen tells his superiors how the founding of the city took place. In 1624, the original inhabitants of the place, belonging to the Lenape tribe, agreed to sell Manhattan Island for 60 florins ($24) to European settlers. Located at the southern tip of the island, the acquired territory was called New Holland and its inhabited core was called New Amsterdam. In 1664, when the English took possession of Manhattan, the enclave was renamed New York.
Three human groups made up the original New York, the settlers of European origin, the Native Americans, and the slaves imported from Africa. The commissioner of New York before being New YorkRussell Shorto, author of The island in the center of the world, a magnificent chronicle of the history of the Dutch colony, invited the descendants of the Lenape who sold Manhattan to the Europeans to write a letter of response to Schagen, 400 years after the transaction. In the response, which can be seen in the exhibition, today’s Lenape speak of 400 years of devastation, disease, forced displacement, oppression, murder, division, suicides and generational traumas. Other documents show the timid beginnings of a long process of emancipation carried out by the colony’s slaves. Not exactly cause for celebration.
But this is how New York was born, beginning the prodigious history of one of the most powerful and influential cities on the planet. A financial, artistic and intellectual center that has barely lost an iota of strength until today. Four centuries later, it can be argued that its vitality and ethnic, religious, linguistic and cultural diversity are unparalleled anywhere else in the world, even though there is never a shortage of those who strive to find comparable urban spaces.
Throughout all those years, there were traumatic moments that had effects that were felt in the rest of the planet, such as the crash of Wall Street that gave rise to the Great Depression of 1929, the destruction of the Twin Towers in September 2001, or the global financial crisis of 2008. But after these and other catastrophes, such as the fires that destroyed large areas of the city in different moments in its history, New York always knew how to engulf itself and be reborn from its ashes, literally and figuratively, always being at the global forefront. The clearest measure of its centrality on a universal scale is given by facts such as the fact that the UN headquarters, the meeting point of all the nations of the world, is located in Manhattan.
One of the things that the Historical Society’s exhibition highlights is that the personality of New York was clearly defined from the moment of its founding. Over the course of 400 years the city has experienced innumerable changes, but its spirit has always been the same, a wild and voracious spirit, individualistic as well as supportive, presided over by the signs of ambition, ruthless competition, tolerance, breadth of vision and diversity. The situation is complex and addressing it requires paying attention to nuances. Or choose between them. In this sense, the true measure of the diversity that exists in New York takes place at the linguistic level. In Language Citya book published earlier this year, author Ross Perlin notes that more than 700 languages are spoken in New York, many of them in danger of extinction.
It is here, in the area of language, where the assessment of the city takes on a different bias. When New York was a colony first Dutch and then English, the presence of Spanish speakers was virtually non-existent. Things changed gradually, very slowly. By 1890 there were a total of 6,000 New Yorkers from different Spanish-speaking countries, including about 1,500 Spaniards. At the beginning of the 20th century, the immigration process began to accelerate, reaching a point where a third of the eight and a half million New Yorkers are of Latin origin.
In this context, the power and vitality of the Spanish language plays a fundamental role. It is difficult, if not impossible, to walk through the different neighborhoods of New York or take the subway without hearing our language; It is not here, nor is it in the rest of the country, a foreign language.
If the Historical Society’s exhibition is an invitation to look to the past, the reality of the city invites us to look to the future. And in a reconfiguration with long historical roots, thanks to immigration of Latin origin, whose waves do not cease, New York is, in a very marked way, a pan-Latin city, and a good part of its identity is based on the strength of a language whose presence is constantly renewed.
Migrants from all over the Spanish-speaking world converge in New York, which has long been creating a new variety of Spanish, resulting from the encounter between so many different ways of speaking the common language. Nowhere else in the Spanish-speaking world does something like this happen, including the fact that a good part of the phenomenon is related to the encounter between Spanish and English. And not everything is reduced to the strict scope of the most recent immigration. In the city there are consolidated media outlets in Spanish of great power, as well as relevant cultural entities, including theaters, radio programs and artistic societies of the most diverse nature.
One fact that should not be lost sight of is that by mid-century the United States will be the country with the largest number of Spanish speakers in the world. And the most populous city in the country will continue to be New York, from whose urban landscape the Spanish will continue to be a character, it already is, impossible to eradicate. It’s more. At certain levels, New York operates as the meeting point of all cultures of Hispanic origin. This is not something new either. The important thing is to point out that no entity or political force can change a fact like this.
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