Life on the receiving end: a subjective look at Anti-Catalan prejudice in Spain today (5.9. 2008). Talk at the LSE by author Matthew Tree

Diumenge, 22.2.2009. 00:00h

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LIFE ON THE RECEIVING END

By: Matthew Tree

Back in the Sixties – Franco's time, when use of the

Catalan language was still largely illegal outside the

privacy of home - there was an incident on the Spanish

Cadena SER radio station that's still remembered in

Catalonia today. The best-known voice of the period, a

presenter called Bobby Deglané – who usually came on to

his guests, according to author Quim Monzó, like a 'knight

in shining syrup' - invited a Catalan comedienne, Mary

Santpere, also well-known throughout Spain, onto his

weekend show. Straight out, he came out with: 'Mary, is it

true that you Catalans, rather than talk, simply bark, just

like dogs?'. To which Santpere, after a moment of being

taken aback, replied, 'I wouldn't say that, but in Catalonia,

as it happens, Bobby is a very typical dog's name'.

Those of us who came to live in post-Franco

Catalonia found and still find it inexplicable that in the

rest of Spain anti-Catalan jibes of the bobbydeglanesque

type, or worse, are a lot more common than anyone might

reasonably expect after 30 years of democracy. The stories

come trickling in year after democratic year from over the

Catalan border, stories of Catalans going out into

monolingual Spain, being identified as such, and then

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being looked at askance, or short-changed, or insulted on

the street, and so on and so forth. For example, one

television cameraman I knew told me how in 2004 he and

his crew had sat down in a restaurant in Burgos only to be

told by the manager, and I quote: ''Si quereis hablar en

catalán, mejor que lo haceis en otro sitio'. My favourite

story of this type, however, is the one told on public radio

a couple of years ago, by the Catalan-language writer

Empar Moliner. No sooner was she speeding out of

Madrid airport in a taxi to the city centre, than her mobile

rang. A friend from Barcelona. She answered. Started

chatting. In Catalan. Within seconds, the driver had

turned to remonstrate: 'Here in Spain, we speak Spanish!'.

Moliner leaned forward and lied: 'Hey, I'm speaking

Italian, eh?, not Catalan'. The reply: 'Oh, that's OK then.

No pasa nada.'

Personally, I find it incomprehensible that the

Catalans who've had such experiences never seem to be

especially affected by them. If someone were to tell me to

stop speaking English to another English speaker, in any

context whatsoever, I would get very cross.

It's true that all these anecdotes, plentiful though

they may be, are just that: anecdotes, mere episodes,

isolated cases of regional sparring of a kind in many

places around the world. Perhaps, it did on occasion occur

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to me, the Catalans were right, even, to treat such

incidents as teacup-sized storms.

Then, in the year 2006 – when the Catalan parliament

was putting together the third Statute of Catalan

Autonomy - I came across two incidents which seemed to

me to be indicative of a great deal more than mere interregional

bitching. On both occasions I was on the

breakfast show of the private Catalan-language radio

station RAC 1; musician Miqui Puig and I had what must

have been one of the easiest paid jobs in the western

hemisphere: for half an hour all we had to do was talk

about things we'd liked and disliked over the past week.

Occasionally, if the pressure of this got too much for us,

the presenter would open the lines and let the hoi-polloi

mention a few likes and dislikes of their own. One Friday,

we got a call from a Barcelona taxi driver; the previous

weekend he had upgraded his taxi to a Mercedes, and

decided to celebrate by going for a long spin to the capital

of Aragon, Saragossa, where he could show off this brand

new tool of his trade – freshly painted, of course, in the

instantly recognisable black and yellow of all Barcelonan

cabs - to some Aragonese friends of his.

No sooner had he stopped at the first set of

Saragossan traffic lights than the drivers to right and left

of him began to wind down their windows and treat him

to a mixture of forthright verbal abuse and earnest

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recommendations to leave town which were clearly

provoked by the Catalan nature of his car. He made it to

his friends' place, only for them to ask him please not to

leave his taxi parked in the street, where they could not

guarantee it remaining in one piece for long. So he drove

it to a car park, on entering which he was accosted by a

group of angry young men who threatened to do his

windows in, no matter where he parked. At this point he

gave up, and, abandoning Saragossa, headed post-haste

for the safety of the Catalan border.

The following Friday, in the same radio studio, we

got another similar call, this time from a town near

Barcelona – Mataró, if I remember rightly - from the

mother of a sixteen year old girl who had just been on a

school trip to Madrid to see the Prado gallery. When this

girl had been chatting to her school friends in Catalan on

the Madrid metro, an elderly man sitting opposite had

told her to speak in Spanish. She refused, saying she

would speak Spanish to him but not to her friends. The

old gent's reply was to the effect that if he were a younger

man he would and I quote 'Smash her face in'. Upon

which a younger man who happened to have followed all

this stood up and offered to do just that. The mother of

this girl went on to tell us how she and the mothers of all

the other girls going on the trip had given their daughters

highly specific instructions before leaving for Madrid:

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they were not to wear any Catalan or Barcelona Football

Club insignia, and if asked about what they thought about

any political issue related to Catalonia, were to keep mum

or change the subject or make themselves scarce. All these

mothers considered these precautions absolutely

necessary.

Now, it might look as if, once again, we're simply

piling isolated anecdote upon isolated anecdote and

trying to draw some overall conclusion from them. But in

these cases, I think it's the small print that counts, so to

speak, in the sense that what makes these two stories

significant is that both the Aragonese friends of the

Barcelona taxi driver and the mothers of the teenagers off

to their school trip

Saragossa and Madrid respectively – a

anecdotal or residual) antipathy towards Catalan people

that might turn ugly, possibly with violent consequences.

That struck me as being indicative of a more widespread

phenomenon that was both unpleasant and – given certain

circumstances – potentially explosive.

As it happened, when reading about anti-Catalan

prejudice in Spain later on, I came across this observation

by the Spanish historian José Antonio Maravall: 'to speak

of something Catalan or to speak in Catalan, in a café in

Madrid or any other major Spanish city, exposes one

automatically to a hostile reaction'. He was writing not

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about Spain in 2006, but about Spain in 1931. What was

happening in 1931? The Catalans were negotiating their

first Statute of Autonomy with central government. What

were they doing in 2006, when the taxi-driver and the

teenage girl's mother phone in their stories of Catalanbaiting?

As mentioned, they were negotiating their third

Statute of Autonomy. So, I thought, is this the key to it all?

Is it just the Catalan Statues of Autonomy that foment

anti-Catalan prejudice in Spain at given moments in time?

Or did it exist before? Is it manifested even when there is

no Statute of Autonomy on the horizon?

*

In Spain, any controversy of any type involving Catalonia

– or the Basque Country, for that matter – is an open

invitation to all kinds of media and political manipulation

of the key terminology. You can barely touch the subject

without setting off carefully placed semantic booby traps.

So before moving on, we'd like to clarify the three key

terms.

Firstly,

the Principality of Catalonia, capital Barcelona, and

doesn't include the other Catalan-speaking areas with

which it still maintains cultural connections, namely

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Valencia, the Balearic Islands, part of southern Aragon,

French Catalonia, the town of Alguer or Alguero in

Sardinia, the state of Andorra and a toenail sized sliver of

northern Murcia. We're not going to talk about any of

these areas.

Secondly,

registered residents of Catalonia, irrespective of where

they come from, where they parents come from, what

colour their skin is and what language they prefer to

speak.

Finally,

here to indicate those areas of Spanish territory in which

Castilian aka Spanish is the

which are home to about 25 million people, out of a total

Spanish population of just over 40 million. The remaining

15 million live in areas where Basque, Galician and

Catalan are co-official languages together with Spanish..

Ok, now we've got all that cleared up, we can go on.

*

Anyone living in Catalonia today can hardly fail to notice

after a while either long or short, that the Catalans'

worldview – that is to say, their perception of where they

stand and how they came to stand there - is remarkably

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different from that of the inhabitants of monolingual

Spain. Whereas the latter's history books, for example, put

Castile and Castilian hegemony at the centre of their story,

those of the Catalans relate Catalonia's slow but consistent

fall from historical grace.

Because this Catalan worldview tends to be littleknown

and because it's impossible to even begin to

understand the existence of anti-Catalan prejudice in

Spain without it, there follows a description, as brief as I

can make it, of how most reasonably well-informed

Catalans view their historical record.

For them, the famous reconquest of the peninsula

from the Moors starting around the 10

achieved not only by the Galaico-Portuguese fighting their

way down the western edge and the Castilians doing the

same down the centre swathe; but also by the Catalan

counts and later the Catalan count-kings who gradually

removed the north-eastern strip of the peninsula from

Arab and Berber control until by 1245 they had claimed

not only Tarragona and Lleida but also Valencia and the

Balearic Islands for Christendom and themselves.

Successive Catalan count-kings used this mainly

coastal territory as a springboard to create a fourteenth

century commercial empire, with direct military control

over Sardinia, Sicily, Naples, a chunk of Anatolia, much of

Greece, including Athens: the Catalan Count-King Peter

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III, thrilled to have the Parthenon in his power, ordered a

dozen crossbowmen to protect it from thieves in 1380.

All this swashbuckling went hand in hand with the

emergence of some of the most precocious

protodemocratic legislation in Europe, always according

to the Catalan view of things. The body of civil law known

as the Usatges, which began to emerge in the 12

paved the way for the Corts Catalanes, a kind of

precocious parliament in which nobles, clergy and even

the artisan class, the proto-bourgeoisie, so to speak, were

included. (Its historical successor, the English Magna

Carta, did not appear on the European scene until a

century later). This Catalan protodemocracy eventually

led to one of the main points of discord between the

Castilians and the Catalans: the king of the latter had to be

approved by parliament before he could take the throne.

The king of the Castilians, their royal tradition being

absolutist, did not.

If our imaginary Catalan is a little better-informed

than usual, he would at this point delight in quoting us

the French historian Pierre Vilar's famous analysis of

Catalonia at this point in her history: 'perhaps, between

1250 and 1350, the Catalan Principality is the one country

in Europe about which it would less inaccurate, less risky,

to describe in apparently anachronistic terms as a nationstate.'.

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If, to drive the point home, the Catalans wanted to be

a bit bolshie, they would casually point out now that at

the time referred to by Pierre Vilar, the flag that

represented Catalonia is the very same one that represents

it still. Whereas the Spanish flag, they would enjoy

adding, was invented by decree on May the 28

After this, even our cocky Catalans would have to

admit, it's downhill all the way. To begin with, a dynastic

alliance in 1469 between Isabel, Queen of Castile, and

Ferdinand II of Aragon, Valencia and Barcelona did

took for granted that there was – ingeneral (not anCatalonia.