What does it mean to be Catalan today?

The BBC program “The Travel Show” is this week-end devoted to Catalonia. The main message is that behind the touristic façade, there is a strong cultural identity.

The narrative of the program is simple: four features symbolize the Catalan identity today, the football club FC Barcelona (Barça), the human towers (castells), a food tradition (calçots), and a political desire for Independence.

Reality is more complex and richer than that. I don’t have much to say about castells and calçots except that they are great.

About Barça, I recommend that anyone interested reads the book “Barça” by Simon Kuper, especially the chapter connecting the complex political reality of Catalonia with the history of the club. It is true that there is a connection between Barça and the resistance to Francoism, although some Barça officials (as many members of the Catalan bourgeoisie and upper classes) supported General Franco’s dictatorship.

Not all football fans in Catalonia are Barça fans (I am). And not all Barça fans have the same political preferences. Barça also has many fans in the rest of Spain (and increasingly in the rest of the world).

On the desire for Independence, things are much more complex than the simplistic narrative of the program suggests. Unfortunately, the only local expert and politician to talk in The Travel Show is Rafael Ribó, a controversial politician that as regional ombudsman, failed to prevent or criticize the erosion of institutions that characterized the Independence drive between 2014 and 2017 (the years of the Scottish referendum, the Brexit referendum and the first Trump victory).

Catalonia is much more diverse than suggested in the program. The regional official statistical office (Idescat) has an excellent document called “Catalonia in figures.” It explains that our community has gained 2 million inhabitants in the last 25 years. Its today more than 8 million inhabitants include 18% of foreign people, many children of foreign people, and many people that descend from families born in other Spainsh regions. The most mentioned as “first language” is Spanish, although 80% of the population are at least bilingual (Catalan and Spanish, with an increasing proportion of people knowing English and many people speaking other languages, such as Arabic).

Another official body, the Centre d’Estudis d’Opinió, in charge of sociological studies, in its last barometer, says that 38% of the population are in favor of Independence, and 54% against. If several options are offered in addition to Independence (such as federalism, or centralism), support for Independence drops to 28%.

It’s not true, as the presenter says in the progam, that on 2017 a majority of Catalans voted in favour of Independence. There was an illegal referendum (organized by the pro-independence parties), where those against Independence largely refused to participate. This kind of referendums are illegal in all developed countries with a written Constitution. Although there was no neutral official body in charge of counting the votes, everybody accepts that participation was less than 50%.

Catalonia is a plural, diverse society. In addition to castells and calçots (and beaches, the Ramblas, Gaudí, Dalí, and many famous authors writing in Spanish such as Cercas, Mendoza or Vila-Matas), we have an open community that shares many of the problems of a developed region or country today.

I believe that a great majority are in favour of a tolerant society that wants to preserve its language (shared with other regions) in the context of an increasingly multilingual, multi-ethnic, and well connected and interdependent community. The most famous Barça players of yesterday and today (Messi, Lamine Yamal) are immigrants or children of immigrants that reflect better the complexity of our society than travel shows on TV.

The program says that Independence today has taken a back seat. This is true.

So, what does it mean to be Catalan today? As the democratically elected current President of the Catalan government, the socialist and federalist Salvador Illa said, a Catalan is anyone that lives here and wants to improve Catalonia.