Viggo Mortensen reads Bartolomé de Las Casas

Actor Viggo Mortensen reads the words of missionary Bartolome de Las Casas who traveled to the America's at the same time at Chirstopher Columbus. Part of a reading from Voices of a People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove) October 5th, 2005 in Los Angeles, California.

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• bartolome
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• casas
• native
• americans
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• history
• spoken
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• reading

[senzafinee]

his spanish sounds very good

[petele345]

Some fools here are fighting about how, what and why Viggo speaks Spanish so well (he spent his childhood in South America) and why that accent (just using the appropriate one for a 16th century Spanish friar/historian from Seville) while missing the best part of his reading, Las Casas description of indigenous people of the Americas and abuse and atrocities committed by European colonizers against them. Stop the stupid arguing and listen to this account of an ugly part of American history.

[nuriaarsenio]

I speak portuguese and the way he speaks spanish is really good.

[chuscales]

Some elements of his Latin American background come through in his diction, but overall he is speaking here in a CONTEMPORARY and accurately pronounced--if a bit stilted--Spanish. He does live in Madrid, and as a gifted multi-lingual person, there is no reason to accuse him of affectation.

[chuscales]

There is nothing pretentious about being a linguistic chameleon. Oh, and his accent is not archaic. It's not as it would have been spoken in the 16th century. The phoneme "th" for c's and z's in modern penisular spanish was still in flux then.

[chuscales]

Negative comments about his Spanish on this thread display all kinds of ignorance. For anyone who is at least minimally familiar with Spanish as it is spoken in most of Spain, and how it contrasts with the many accents of Latin America, Mr. Mortensen's accent is studiously proper and contemporary.

[johalieb1]

This is important. This primary source is 500 years old...and tells us how bad his contemporaries behaved.

[meg3325]

@bonchatbonrat - Viggo's Spanish is perfect. I'm also American and speak English, Japanese and studied French. I think Americans are becoming more multilingual because we live in a global world.

[juba47ful]

bueniiismo! saluudos desde argentina. LaTinoamerica stAnd Up

[rmbouwens]

ME ENCANTA SU ESPANOL!!!! Deseo que seria tan buena.......tengo envidia.

[bonchatbonrat]

@PHANTOMSLAYER77 Well...Viggo is speaking Spanish in this video right now, isn't he? And guess what, HE'S AMERICAN! I am American as well, and I speak Spanish, French and Polish. Some fit your stereotype, yes, but a lot of Americans can speak more than one language and are very culturally and socially aware.