Spain, Durango and the Hispanics of the USA

Recently an interesting article was published in El País about the strength of the Hispanics in the USA. At Instituto Hemingway it reminded us one of our students, Jon Durango, an American of Mexican origin who visited us a while ago. His aim was to refresh his old Spanish and to visit Durango, the Basque town near Bilbao. By doing this, Jon completed his plan to visit the three “Durangos”, in the USA, Mexico and Spain. So, we would like to congratulate Jon for this and for improving his level of Spanish.
In the El País article, published on October 30th, Rafael Chamorro said that “the Hispanic market is very interesting from the tourist point of view. According to predictions, by 2010 the 45 million Hispanics of the country will have a total buying capacity of 1 billion dollars, more than Mexico’s GDP and marking a spectacular increase since the start of the decade.”
Each year, more than 1 million Americans visit Spain and, after a few years of decline after 2001, the number is fortunately on the rise again. It would be very beneficial to convince Hispanics to include Spain in their trips too. Maybe the challenge is knowing how to talk to them. The second generation, born in the United States, usually speaks English as their first language, but also has a very strong emotional connection with the Spanish language. Even if some very powerful methods of communication exist in Spanish, this new generation is also an avid consumer of Anglo-Saxon canals. One of these methods is to interest them with the origin of their names, which are largely of Spanish roots, and the places where they can find their origins. The challenge is to create interest in common Hispanic culture.
Our competitors have already realised the potential of the Hispanic market, and some European tourism offices have specific marketing directed towards this sector of the population. The Spanish tourism offices in United States, for their part, focus specifically on the Hispanic public and consider it as their priority market. But, says Javier Valenzuela, “a joint strategy of public powers, firms and methods of communication could be extremely effective in this aim.”