Who is Catalan? by Dolors Clotet

Original article in Catalan published in 2024: Qui és català?

Edited Machine Translation.

At the beginning of the 2000s, my mother worked in an automotive factory near Abrera. Part of the new immigration that arrived and was added to the previous one, the Castilian, was known as "Catalan". Ciutadans still did not have a great media push and, practically everywhere, or at least in a large part of the metropolitan area that had received the flood of immigration from the Franco regime a few decades earlier, the distinction between Catalans and Castilians worked perfectly. Catalans were, obviously, all those who spoke Catalan and had integrated it in all areas of life, mainly in the fact of passing it on to their children. Castilians, those who, wherever they were from, spoke Spanish. The distinction did not, in fact, have a negative connotation, but merely descriptive. Despite the official story of a single people and the particular interests of parties such as the PSC, which denied the conflict with Spain and, at the same time, encouraged the ethnolinguistic dispute, especially in the large metropolitan areas, on the street the distinction was vivid. In the official media, however, the terms Catalan-speaking and Spanish-speaking were already hegemonic.

Languages survive for two reasons, the first, utility, and the second, identification with a group or community. Both for demographic reasons and the inability to apply the (insufficient) power that autonomy gives, the first of these reasons has been losing more weight. You can live and work in Catalonia not only without speaking Catalan, but without knowing it, as the Generalitat guarantees in areas such as health. The second, who had given us so much joy, was already born breech. First, because the subject of Spanish immigration was not discussed in depth. All the complexities were smoothed over, and it was deliberately overlooked that the Spanish immigrant, ethnically Castilian, was in a position of superiority to the extent that his language and culture was that of the State. The Pujolist statement "he is Catalan who lives and works in Catalonia and wants to be one" quickly transmuted into "he is Catalan who lives and works in Catalonia", forgetting the volitional part. Consciously, since Spanishism, the aim was to ensure that the purely administrative definition of Catalan, that is, Spanish - Catalan as registered in the autonomous community of Catalonia - completely supplanted the cultural sense, the only one that, without a state, the Catalans were in control. The terms Spanish-speaking and Catalan-speaking made it even easier to achieve this, after all, we were all equally Catalan, only that some spoke Spanish and the others, Catalan.

The success of the administrative definition of Catalan, however, would not be explained without the political changes of the first two decades of 2000 and the process. The reasons, for sure, are many, stupidity, political blindness, 'good' intentions, zero socio-linguistic knowledge, malice, complicity, and pure individual interest have mixed until giving us the current result. The step was similar to what the elites of the former American colonies did. The only way we could allow ourselves to imagine being independent was to accept Castilian colonization. Offer a new state in Spain where Spanish was official and Catalans the indigenous minority. In 2012 Eduard Voltas wrote his famous article In Spanish too, please ^[1]>, where the imposition of Spanish was naturalized (even celebrated). Everyone was equally Catalan, regardless of the use and responsibility they had for the Catalan language, which was something of only one part, the Catalan speakers. A year later, in 2013, Súmate was born and the idea was consolidated. We were one people, but Catalan no longer belonged to everyone. An important part of the Catalans who became independentists wanted independence to avoid Castilian assimilation in Spain, but the only way to achieve it was, paradoxically, according to the media and political power, by becoming Castilian and minoritizing to attract non-Catalans. Now only "social improvements" mattered. Accepting reality meant resigning to the fact that Spain had won us over culturally through demographics. The immigration blackmail was starting again, the truth could not be told. You could not denounce the imposition of Castilian or the situation of internal colonialism, using the term of Robert Lafont, who lives in Catalonia, because this could offend those of Castilian immigrant origin. It was better not to risk possible violence from the Castilians of Catalonia towards the Catalans. It was preferable to linger in a coexistence that served as an excuse for cowardice.

Now, however, it is necessary to resume the battle to define who is Catalan. The state of linguistic and cultural minority that we live in, demographics against it, and political betrayal place us in a very weak position. If it ends up being assumed that everyone who lives in Catalonia is Catalan and only some, the Catalan speakers, are the ones who have to use and defend it, we will have lost the last battle They will have reduced us to one more social group, in one more culture of a pretended multicultural Catalonia with Spanish as the lingua franca. Or, in the words of Ada Colau: "there is no Catalan identity separate from the diversity that makes up Catalonia". In fact, both TV3 and ARA work in this line. With the immigration debate reopened (now including globalization immigration, that of the 2000s), the blackmail resumes. The Catalans of Florida was the article signed by Esther Vera a few days ago, followed by a dossier called Els altres Catalans (del segle 21) ["The other Catalans (from the 21st century)"]. Even clearer was Antoni Batista's opinion piece from a few days earlier, Immigració i indepegració (Immigration and indepegration^[2]>), where he repeated the idea that we are a welcoming country - that is, that this feature is our only identity feature shared—and that immigration is necessary. In addition, he added that, in order to include this new immigration in the independence project, it is necessary, apart from more social measures, to abandon the "basic theory of Catalan identity". In fact, without any desire to hide his intention, he puts Sinn Féin as a model, which, for him, is quite an example to the extent that it has many voters who neither understand nor speak Gaelic. Thus, Spain's plan to end up trivializing Catalan to the point of being useless and not even being linked to being Catalan, because if you are both Catalan you speak Catalan and Spanish, just as you are Irish even if you speak English only, it is endorsed line by line by the most obvious Spanishism of the Commons up to the supposedly pro-independence media and political environment.

Without abandoning the argument of usefulness - you can live in Catalonia without Catalan, but it is still useful, and should be more so, to access certain jobs or environments -, it must be understood that the argument of group identity has been one of the most powerful. If part of the Spanish immigration decided to transmit Catalan, it was because they understood that, broadly speaking, a Catalan is someone who makes their own and transmits the Catalan language and the culture that goes with it. It was, because of the will to want to be Catalan, a change of allegiance from one group to another, from one language to another, from one identity to another, no matter how much of the previous one could be preserved things So who is Catalan? Catalan is and must be anyone who, as a condition sine qua non, identifies Catalan as their language and transmits it to new generations, at the same time that, through this language, transmits, to a lesser or greater extent, also a whole series of own cultural practices. Above all, folklorization must be avoided, that is, someone who has not adopted the language, but who participates in some Catalan tradition, for example makes his uncle shit, eats calçots or makes castles, is considered Catalan. Contrary to what we are usually told, only a strong identity will be able to maintain generationally those of us who are already Catalan and, if possible, integrate part of the immigration.

[1] "In Catalan, please" is a known slogan in defence of the use of Catalan. 

[2] "Indepegration" is seemingly a fusion of "independentist" and "integration".