The Catalan pressure pot woke up recently with a news item out of the official media: for the first time in Catalonia, he said, the population born abroad exceeds 25%. It is not true. This does not want to be a historical or demographic article, but in the face of these biased approaches to reality, it may be worth doing this preamble. Catalonia, the aisle of Europe, has experienced at least two phenomena that belie it.
The first. During the 16th and 17th centuries, a country ravaged by pests and wars experienced population growth over 100% thanks to a massive Occitan migratory wave. They are the originals. Politically French citizens of which many Catalans came from and who also suffered – like all immigrant groups – xenophobia. It must be said, and this could be a cliché but it is not much, that the Catalan has been a tolerant society with which it has been agreed to call melindrose “newcomers”. By character or rather due to demographic necessity, the door has been opened here to all God. An unwritten law naturalized the Occitan Marabunta by accrediting a one -year and one -day residence. That’s how easy we do.
The second. During the twentieth century Catalonia again doubled its population with the substantial immigration competition. This time he did not come from France, but from Spain. People with whom the Catalans shared – and we share, according to the latest data – political citizenship. The mistake of the news, of course, comes from here. In Mallorca they are very clear and everyone who is born out of the island is “”. But here we have our heads so colonized that we find it ugly to say “foreigner” to those who were not born in Catalonia, lest someone angry. It does not have, from a socio -cultural point of view, no sense.
In both cases, these similar ones received them in the absence of democracy. In the case of the most recent, however, it can be suspected that there were political intentions to take advantage of it. It has never been clarified if, from the one hand, the Francoist, he obeyed an orchestrated repopulation program. Since there is no proof, we will circumscribe it to the fantasy of these who are around social networks with silver paper hubs, which gives them life. It is clearer, because there is extensive documentation, which on the opposite side that was articulated around Catalanism was a substantial concern. For them, educated in republican Catalonia, almost uninational and monolingual, this disabled them: they had no precedents or tools to understand, and, above all, politically controlling a change in the beastly population structure, which modified what the pedants call the demonstration and conditioned the entire political system and the ruling paintings that were being prepared consciously for when it was left.
And we reach the other Paco, the. In 1962, just after the floods of the Vallès and the commotion they caused, Josep Benet wrote an article in Serra d’Or. It is called – well, in fact it is noted by Jordi Amat, who has studied it and served as a curator of the edition ofThe other Catalans Unto censorship – that is the first time the concept has been used in the political sense that has made so much fortune. Benedict says that “Spanish” ethnicity migration (to understand us) were most of the victims of the floods and were ‘these’ other Catalans’ that Francesc Candel spoke to us on one day. Here, also, another topic of reflection that we cannot shy away from: as they are welcomed, in our country, these immigrants who, by their work, become Catalans. This sounds very rational, because Pujolism has bombed us for more than fifty years, but analyzed in care has nothing natural: it comes to tell us that Catalan identity must be undressed from ethnic components and it must be reduced to a mere work question. It has neither head nor feet, unless you manage a state with powers to give and remove nationalities, which was never – not that has been – the case. In spite of everything, the idea, very crazy, functioned as the basis of the cryptointegration program from political secrecy.
Benet’s article appears two years before the publication ofThe other Catalans And he omitted that he had commissioned Candel himself to write the book. We will never know for sure who made the concept. Candel himself, who is already talking about “the Catalan others” in 1958, was probably a purely Benetian invention, agreed with Montserrat effluvi between the PSUC and the original democratic convergence. In fact, he is Jordi Pujol, obsessed with the distortions that immigration had on the design of his future Catalonia, who buys without amendments the whole program as the basis of his future political success. Also Serra d’Orand on the occasion of the publication of the book by Sant Jordi in 1964, Pujol writes: “Our central problem, as a country, is not the language neither the social question nor the economic progress or any political problem. [recordem que això ho afirma al bell mig d’una dictadura sagnant]: Our central problem is immigration and, therefore, integration. “
The imposition of the doctrine of “The Other Catalans” exiled the amendments to the more “nationalists”, which were in the face of a definition of Catalan identity based on the “Catalan who lives and works in Catalonia”, but also silenced the voices of anti-nationalism (Catalan). In issue 37 of Barcelona magazine Promos Hi Podem Trobar A criticism of Antoni Pérez González who is a veritable Lerrouxist barrage against the Llibre of Candel. IUU, between delicate altres, which “has caused a curious and significant impact of joy on the professionals of the ‘idealistic, romantic, property and to The other Catalans A rico filon for feeding its ambiguous expectations and being able to echo in the vuelo its ‘Catalan conscience’, adds: “ The impatient ‘integrationism’ with relation to the immigrant dough legs to disgust us as something emfermiz. Ideas that arise as a reaction to the alleged betrayal of Candel have survived strongly, as the ideological basis of the Citizens and Adlatera party, as well as in a permanent sonsonia of the Catalan Xarneguista movement.The other Catalanswho maintained hegemony as the Pujolism lasted but then faded and now sounds a little thunderstorm.
But the story is written by the winners, they say. The great merit of the triumphant concept “the other Catalans” is that he managed to train a demos inside another demos And it allowed tortillas without breaking the eggs, what we like so much. It is, well, a very solid and competent first processism. Candel himself, was amazed at the success of the book, and when Benedict and Pujol take him on touring and excursions, one feels that he begins to make a series of hallucinated discoveries over the country. We need to keep in mind that Candel was a raw, hard novelist, with a tendency to sarcasm. It was massacred by censorship, because the regime could not consent to its portraits of a society that bordered the third. His literary approaches to the discontinued, to misery and immigration were based, as we can see for example Where the city changes its namein a distant observation that today would not be labeled an empathetic. He shook, at least literally, charity and condescension. He was a good storyteller, but it is highly unlikely that in the design of his writer’s career he could have imagined that he would go to the posterity because he had signed a political program that, after all, is a minor rehearsal within his production. Over the years he got used to it and must be said, as a definitive praise, that he tried to resist the role of a pet reserved by Jordi Pujol.
The other Catalans
Francesc Candel
Editions 62 / The pocket
416 pages. 21.90 euros
