00:00Right now, somewhere in the Spanish-speaking world, today is a national holiday.
00:05Somewhere else, that exact same day, is a day of mourning.
00:10Same 24 hours, same historical event,
00:13and more than 10 countries can't agree on what to call it or how to feel about it.
00:19In Spain, it's the National Day.
00:22In Venezuela, it's Indigenous Resistance Day.
00:25In Bolivia, Decolonization Day.
00:28And in Colombia, it still carries the name the rest of the continent already left behind.
00:34One event. More than 10 official names.
00:38Zero agreement.
00:40By the end of this video, you'll understand exactly why
00:43and what still unites 600 million Spanish speakers, in spite of it all.
00:49It all begins here.
00:51Two in the morning, October 12th, 1492.
00:55A sailor named Rodrigo de Triana stares into the darkness from the deck of La Pinta
01:00and shouts the word that will change two continents forever.
01:05Land!
01:07Columbus' own logbook admits Triana saw it first,
01:10but afterward, Columbus claims he'd spotted a light hours earlier.
01:15He goes looking for witnesses to back him up.
01:18By most accounts, the sailor who actually found the New World
01:21never collected the reward he was promised.
01:24Even Spain couldn't agree on what to call its own holiday.
01:29Fiesta de la Raza, Festival of the Race, in 1918.
01:34Dia de la Hispanidad, Hispanic Heritage Day, formalized in 1958.
01:40Fiesta Nacional de España, Spain's National Day, the current name since 1987.
01:46Three different official names in a single country.
01:51And that was just the beginning.
01:53Because when this holiday crossed the Atlantic,
01:56the renaming didn't stop.
01:58It was only getting started.
02:01Venezuela rewrote the day entirely in 2002.
02:04They called it Indigenous Resistance Day.
02:07Bolivia did the same in 2012 with Decolonization Day.
02:11Argentina renamed it in 2010.
02:15And in December 2020, Mexico did exactly the same thing.
02:21Mexico's government explained it wanted to move away from a conquest-centered story
02:26and put its Indigenous and Afro-Mexican communities at the center instead.
02:31Ten names, ten countries,
02:34and in almost every case, the same underlying question.
02:38Do we celebrate an encounter or remember a conquest?
02:42And here's what nobody tells you.
02:45The very language carrying this whole debate
02:48is itself proof that cultures have always mixed.
02:52Nearly 4,000 everyday Spanish words come from Arabic.
02:57Ojalá, hopefully.
02:59Almohada, pillow.
03:01Aceite, oil.
03:03Nearly 800 years of Al-Andalus hidden inside the language you use to order a coffee.
03:10You've been speaking a little Arabic your whole life without even knowing it.
03:15So the real question was never who's right about this day.
03:19The question is, if even the language isn't pure,
03:23what actually unites 600 million people who speak it?
03:27So if you're talking to someone from Spain,
03:30they'll probably say the National Day.
03:32If they're from Venezuela, Indigenous Resistance Day.
03:37If they're from Mexico, Pluricultural Nation Day.
03:41And if you're not sure,
03:43the safest move is just to ask what they call it in their country.
03:47Nobody takes offense to that.
03:49And while we're at it,
03:51Hispanidad isn't the same as Latinidad.
03:55Hispano-America isn't the same as Latino-America.
03:58The second one includes Brazil,
04:01which speaks Portuguese, not Spanish.
04:03And Ibero-America adds Portugal into the mix.
04:07Three words that sound alike and mean different things.
04:12These are small details,
04:14but they're exactly the details that show
04:16this isn't ancient history, dead in a book.
04:20It's something people are still living,
04:22naming, and arguing about right now.
04:26In Madrid, a goat in a ceremonial cape
04:29leads the military parade
04:30under a sky streaked with red and yellow smoke.
04:34It's a decades-old tradition.
04:36And yes, it's exactly as odd as it sounds.
04:40200 miles away in Saragossa,
04:43up to 450,000 people spend eight hours
04:47building a mountain of flowers
04:49for the city's patron saint.
04:52And the giants and big heads,
04:54papier-mâché figures designed in 1849,
04:58still chase kids through the streets.
05:00In Caracas, 26-foot puppets
05:04act out indigenous creation stories
05:06right in the street.
05:08And the day's central honoree is Guaicaipuro,
05:11a 16th-century leader
05:13who united several indigenous peoples
05:15against colonization,
05:17and whose remains received, in 2001,
05:20the same honor given to the nation's founding heroes.
05:24In La Paz, the date opens
05:26with an indigenous spiritual ceremony,
05:28the Taki Onkoy,
05:30for thousands of participants.
05:35A ritual that's still alive today,
05:39just as it was centuries ago.
05:41And in Argentina, it's much quieter.
05:44A day that lives in classrooms,
05:46not in the streets.
05:50And while all of this is happening,
05:52the language's center of gravity
05:54is shifting again.
05:55The United States is already
05:57the fourth largest Spanish-speaking country
05:59in the world.
06:01The Instituto Cervantes projects
06:03that by 2060,
06:04it will be the second-largest
06:06Spanish-speaking country
06:07on the entire planet.
06:09Six Latin American authors
06:11have won the Nobel Prize in Literature,
06:13writing in Spanish.
06:14And the language keeps growing fastest,
06:17not in Spain,
06:18but on the other side of the Atlantic.
06:21Ten countries,
06:23ten names,
06:24ten different ways of living,
06:26or mourning,
06:27the same day.
06:30And one shared language,
06:32strong enough to survive all of it.
06:35That's what Hispaniidad means today.
06:37Not a verdict on 1492,
06:40but hundreds of millions of people
06:42who still write,
06:44sing,
06:44and argue
06:45in the same language
06:47because of it.
06:49So what about you?
06:51What do they call this day
06:53in your country?
06:56Tell us in the comments.
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