Editor's note: This article was updated on Jan. 12, 2018 to clarify certain details of Catalonia's history and the author's feelings toward Spanish culture.
I write these lines with tears rolling down my cheeks. They soon will reach my lips, and perhaps their subtle saltiness will wake me up from this trance of perplexity. My name is Clàudia Esplugas Masvidal, and I am from Barcelona, Catalonia. Three months ago, I could have never foreseen the situation my fellow Catalonians and I now find ourselves in: Our president is in exile and our vice president and ministers of our government, as well as civilians, are in prison. One of them is my family member. Our public television is being shut down, and my high school professors are afraid of talking of politics in class in fear of being cited in court as “brainwashing” students in favor of secession from Spain.
I know that in our post-2016-election U.S. society, the scenario I just described doesn’t sound that much out of place, but yes, in case you were doubtful, that is what Europe is like in 2018.
For the duration of this quarter, I will be writing this column, “Stories of Sovereignty,” and I will dare to talk about communities and nations, locally and globally, that are currently experiencing a struggle for the right to control their lands, the distribution of their natural resources, the development of their educational system … their ultimate sovereignty.
And I say “dare” because trying to fit the wholeness of people’s resiliency within the lines of an article is impossible. But accepting myself as a biased being and using myself as a filter as I’ve learned to do in ethnography, I will try to capture (in the best way that I can) the beauty in these movements, and I hope to light the fire within you to join them.
I first became very passionate about highlighting these movements when I wrote about the struggle at Standing Rock for The Daily. The strength and clarity in the rhetoric of every single member of the American Indian Studies department I interviewed shocked me deeply.
Now that my people find themselves in a similar situation where an organized, nonviolent movement is being met with brutality and aggression by part of an oppressive state, I seem to find this sense of clear serenity coming from our sadness, but also our indignation.
This is why I must introduce you to the struggle in Catalonia, my home. I have interviewed professors, students, and even an imprisoned member of our government who will all become witnesses in the following articles. But for now, here is a brief history of our nation:
You may have heard of our small land by the Pyrenees and the Mediterranean. Barcelona is our capital. We have one of the oldest parliaments in Europe, our languages are Catalan and Spanish (we are bilingual), and we have our own culture and traditional practices such as the “castellers,” or human castles.
In 1714 we lost what little independence we had when, as farmers and land workers with no army, we defended our fields against the Spanish tyranny. When the Siege of Barcelona, which lasted almost a year, lost to the Spanish army of Philip V of Bourbon, our state was abolished, Catalan and our culture were banned and persecuted, and a castle was built on top of one of the hills that overlooks Barcelona with cannons pointing toward the city. It was a reminder to everyone that trying to revive the sense of identity that had been taken would end in massacre again.
Today, the silhouette of that castle, Montjuic, still dominates our landscape like a living cemetery. It was also used during the civil war by the dictatorship of the fascist Spanish army, and many people were tortured, executed, and buried along the mountain. A few years ago was the 75th anniversary of the murder of La Generalitat Lluís Companys, who was arrested by the Nazi police for declaring the Catalan Republic in 1934, and was brought to the hands of the fascist justice and was murdered by firing squad in 1940 in that very same castle.
The post-dictatorial Spanish government has never condemned the crimes committed during those dark decades, and I believe these unhealed wounds all over Spain reveal a multinational state that hasn’t been able to forgive itself and whose members haven’t been able to make peace with one another in order to move forward.
Nowadays, Catalonia constitutes an autonomous community of Spain, with our own constitution and parliament. Still, we respond to Madrid to approve any law and pay a large amount of taxes which are returned unequally, unlike the other autonomous communities of Spain.
Similarly, the Catalan language and culture has been suppressed since 1714. In particular, it was banned in schools, and it wasn’t until the generation before me that Catalan was reborn in our classrooms. As you can imagine, there are mixed feelings among us when it comes to feeling Spanish and identifying as it, because while we are born in Catalan, we are Spanish citizens. Some of us feel both Spanish and Catalan, some don’t. Personally, I feel human and part of planet Earth, and there are many things about the Spanish culture that I love, like its poetry and art.
I love visiting and admiring the multiculturality of the Spanish state, but I feel that such diversity is never truly welcome. Many of us didn’t consider independence for a long time; some members of my own family wouldn’t have considered it in the past 10 years.
But since 2010, when our Catalan Constitution “Estatut” was cut by the Spanish government and our language, as well as the term “nation,” was put in question, we had enough and started the movement that has led us to today.
Now, in less than three months, our seven-year-old exemplary peaceful movement, led by people who only ask the Spanish government the basic human right to vote on whether we want to be part of Spain or not, has undergone a kind of repression that I could have only imagined happening during the times of the fascist dictatorship that my grandmother experienced in the early 20th century.
We went from a massive demonstration in Sept. 2017 in Barcelona, where more than a million people asked for our rights to vote on a referendum for independence on Oct. 1, to the brutal repression of the 2 million nonviolent civilians seeking to vote that day at the hands of the Spanish police. As a result of that day, more than a thousand people were wounded, our Catalan government was fully dissolved, our legitimate president Carles Puigdemont was exiled, and political prisoners were incarcerated in Madrid.
And Europe? What’s her stand on this injustice? I guess the same Europe that has refugees freezing to death in camps is still a growing union, a child composed of cultures that have coexisted closely for thousands of years, in peaceful and more complex times, is still discovering who she is and what justice she believes in.
So far, we see silence from Catalonia, like an individual abused by their partner walks into the sunshine with a black eye and sees the neighborhood uncomfortably looking the other way. There is always hope, though, that people will wake up. I ask you now to follow me as we become witnesses to this resilience by the Catalan people, as well as others close to us here in Seattle, and to participate in the conversations about their rights, their struggles, and their successes. We will see different stories, but they all have something in common: We have the voice and the tools to create results.
Reach writer Clàudia Esplugas Masvidal at opinion@dailyuw.com. Twitter: @ClaudiaEsplugas
