2023-12-10 04:04:00
Don’t let them fool you with political, economic or cultural excuses. The only struggle that has truly been taking place in Catalonia for four decades is between miscegenation and xenophobia. It obeys completely accidental demographic reasons and is the same that will occur – only with the protagonists changing – throughout the world in the next century with the demographic explosion of the Sub-Saharan Sahel.
If there had not been emigration from the interior of Spain in the last century, Catalans would now number two million and there are eight of us. Those six million who come from mixing with emigration generally have more family ties with the rest of the peninsula, we use Spanish as our mother tongue and we are much more reticent towards particularistic nationalism. Of course, origin and ideology do not always overlap exactly. There are mestizos who – to grow or because of an inferiority complex – play along with the most obtuse indigenous traditionalism and there are also family sagas of indigenous origin who have hated for generations everything that has to do with the regionalist flag. But the exchanges are balanced and in the end the average makes the panorama quite faithful to the demographic origin. Suffice it to say that the number of independentists here is always around, curiously, that figure of two million.
Like any area subject to large emigrations, Catalonia suffers from this modern virus of xenophobia and racism, only hiding it with excuses to look good. Many politicians take advantage of it to achieve their own selfish benefits or accumulation of power to perpetuate themselves in the armchair. Without going any further, this week a Spanish politician – one of those who are now trying to justify his sudden change of convictions – stated that, according to a survey, 70 percent of Catalans did not view amnesty as a tool negatively. The figure surprised me, because it did not coincide with what we Catalans can verify simply by going out into the street and talking to our neighbors. Looking at the figures in detail, it turned out that seven out of ten independentists thought this way. What the national boss had done was, once again, the perverse operation of identifying Catalans with Catalanists to make invisible all Catalans who are not nationalists: a spectrum, the latter, more coming from emigration and from more humble families, which said politician (only supposedly left-wing) would theoretically be the one he should protect.
Non-nationalist Catalans have been accustomed to this invisibility for decades. Power always practices with us. Coming from more disadvantaged neighborhoods, we do not have the weight or means that the wealthy classes have and it is easy to leave us aside and ignore us. In return, we have the advantage of being the group that, due to a simple adaptive necessity to survive, is more flexible, more agile, more resistant, more mobile and fun. In a society with as little social mobility as the Catalan one, it is in that group where you find a more constant elevation of children to one more small social step. Which generates more suggestive, interesting and vivid situations than in other places. Of course, it is frustrating to have your voice constantly taken away at an institutional level and your existence denied, but curiously in return we receive great popular affection from people outside those institutions throughout Spain. This visibility of other Catalans by pedestrians throughout the peninsula has been the most important change in mentality in recent years. Politicians ignore us, but the population appreciates us; breaking the hegemonic narrative of power.
Just as women sought their place in the social showcase years ago, the mestizo will need egalitarian politicians to defend their presence. Difficult task for the current parties of the supposed left, when in view of the quarrels they have between them, they reveal the image of being taken over by Aryan hostesses from well-to-do homes who are there to be forgiven for the philo-fascist role of their socially privileged families. With leftist parties converted into simple placement agencies for these profiles in exchange for seven votes, it will not be strange if – in a contradictory and counterintuitive way – Vox is the one who finally gains the support and more representation of all this miscegenation in the humble neighborhoods. .
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