Prince of Asturias Awards 1981–2014. Speeches

4 O viedo | C ampoamor T heatre | 18 th O ctober 1991 Its heroic nigh-on century-long defence of Spanish was not simply a feat of our intellectuals, our politicians and our writers. The decisive resistance was made by the people, by the simple, humble folk of Puerto Rico. Resistance was spawned in the San Juan quarter, in the rocky outcrops of Cabo Rojo, in the sugar-cane plantations of my native town of Ponce, on the beaches of Luquillo, in the mountains of Utuado, by the humble peasants who learnt their prayers, their ten-line stanzas and their ballads in Spanish. Resistence was born of this people and nation, which treasures the Castilian vocabulary used to describe their lives in hidden corners of their very being and in the palpitation of their souls. The people are the heroes. It is the people who have preserved the language in which God purveyed the Gospel according to Don Quixote to Cervantes. It was the people and their heroic resistance that enables us to belong to the language community that unites the three hundred and forty one million people who express themselves in Spanish. The people’s victory has enabled the works of our poets, novelists, playwrights and essayists to be produced in the universal language that they share with Juan Ramón Jiménez, Borges, García Márquez, Cela and Octavio Paz. On behalf of the land of Borinquen, who took the words of its national anthem from one of the offspring of the land that now bestows this Award upon us; on behalf of the island that this great Asturian figure called the daughter of the sea and the sun; on behalf of the good people of Puerto Rico, who have remained true to themselves, I thank you. Rafael Hernández Colón, on behalf of the People of Puerto Rico — Prince of Asturias Award for Literature 1991 Rafael Hernández Colón was Governor of Puerto Rico in 1991. He had first held this office from 1973 to 1977 and subsequently did so between 1985 and 1993. — Excerpt from the speech given on the occasion of receiving the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature on 18/10/1991.