Constructing Catalan Identity

Memory, Imagination, and the Medieval

Michael A. Vargas

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319767444
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

This is a book about how Catalans use their past, real and imagined, in the construction of their present and future. Michael A. Vargas inventories the significant people, signal events, and familiar icons that constitute the Catalan collective memory, from Wilfred the Hairy and Sant Jordi to the mountain monastery of Montserrat, red peasant caps, and human towers in town squares. He then considers how that inventory is employed to posit a brilliant political heritage at the forefront of modern European democracy—and for some, to build a powerful independence movement. As the future of Catalonia remains fraught, this book offers a lively and engaging exploration of how we draw upon history to confront contemporary challenges.

© The Author(s) 2018

Michael A. VargasConstructing Catalan Identityhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76744-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Michael A. Vargas¹

(1)

State University of New York at New Paltz, NY, USA

End Abstract

This book is about the use of the past, especially the medieval past, in present-day Catalonia. It is full of curious illustrations of a people, the Catalans, who draw upon their history with great sensitivity and imagination. The book’s broader goal is to consider how we all use the past, and perhaps misuse it too, to confront the challenges of our present and future. I have no personal investment in Catalonia or Catalan history, although I have come to learn that their fascinating history makes a great case study for understanding how all of us put the past to work. The choice of Catalonia, at present a part of northeastern Spain, is strategic. Catalans have had powerful reasons over many centuries to ponder their past, and, because they possess a very long and rich history, they have gained considerable expertise at reshaping it to meet their needs.

At present, Catalonia is a part of Spain. “At present” is an important qualification. Catalonia has been Spanish for several hundred years, but it is equally true to say that there was a time before Spain, a time when Catalonia existed but Spain did not. Catalonia is in Spain’s northeast, framed by the Pyrenees Mountains to the north and a long Mediterranean coast to the south and east. Aragon is to the west, and Valencia touches Catalonia at its southern border. At a bit more than twelve thousand square miles, about the size of the US state of Maryland, Catalonia makes up about 16% of Spain’s landmass. With just over 7.5 million inhabitants, its population makes up about 15% of the total population of Spain. Despite Catalonia’s relatively small land mass and population, the Catalan economy is robust, producing about 20% of Spain’s economic output. Barcelona, Catalonia’s capital city, home to 1.5 million residents, is a center of European finance and business and one of Europe’s premiere tourist destinations.¹

At the time of this book’s publication, Catalonia has been making international news. Its leaders declared independence from Spain in October of 2017, following a plebiscite that the Spanish government declared illegal. Spain then jailed some of Catalonia’s elected leaders, and the president of Catalonia’s governing body, the Generalitat , went into a self-imposed exile in Brussels, Belgium. Why Catalans would want to leave Spain is a subject of this book, although such a question is not answered very well if one tries to go at it directly. It is said that Catalans are politically oppressed, or jealously guarding their economic vitality, or turning their youth into brainwashed zealots, or that half of the Catalan population are no better than lawless renegades. None of these explanations of present political circumstances gets us very far. The present situation in Catalonia is deeply informed by a very rich Catalan past and even more by the purposeful recollection of that past.

Learning to Possess the Past

Let’s set the scene with a curious activity witnessed in Catalan kindergartens. One of the first lessons Catalan children learn about their people and place is devoted to Count-King James I. Who is he, and why should he matter?

James was born in 1208. He came into his princely inheritance at the age of five, following the battlefield death of his father, Pere III . He inherited the prosperous Mediterranean County of Barcelona and several other counties. In these counties he was called “prince” and “count,” like his predecessors. James also inherited the small, less prosperous, landlocked Kingdom of Aragon, in which territory he was called “king.” During his first years as a child ruler, the boy count-king encountered the treachery of his uncle and other regents who sought to steal his inheritance, but as he grew into a fearsome young man he surmounted their thievery and learned to wield his royal powers with formidable skill. History textbooks call him “the Conqueror” because he gained and consolidated through conquest lands along the Mediterranean coast, including Valencia and the Balearic Islands. These conquests set Catalonia on a course that made it an international power. James also patronized the arts and attended to the administration of law and order. Of special relevance to the value of the past in the present is the claim Catalans proudly make that James’s Llibre dels Fets (The Book of Deeds) is the first autobiography by a Christian king. James died in 1276.

(In a curious side note, James’s embalmed body was exhumed in 1859 from its burial crypt at the royal monastery of Poblet. A photograph taken at the time, available online, shows the damage done to his skull caused by a spear that hit him just above the eye when he was young. The wound had no apparent negative effect upon his attractiveness: He was married three times and took several lovers of high birth. He had at least sixteen children by the six wives and lovers of whom we know.)

Returning now to the youngsters and the little song they sing about the count-king’s significance as a legendary progenitor of the Catalan people…. Imagine a classroom of twenty or so six-year-old children. They have spent some days gathering up plastic swords and painting bright cardboard shields, which they now have in hand. And they are stomping to a tune as they march around their classroom. Their song “Jaume Primer Tenia Cent Soldats” (“James the first has one hundred soldiers […] all marching in step”) tells the story of the faithfulness of those who stand by their count-king. Various “home-movie” versions of the kids in action are available online.²

For the children, performing their little in-unison march is surely a great occasion for play. But there is a lot of meaning embedded in what looks like simple good fun. The teachers clearly employ it as a tool for teaching a bit of history, although it needs saying—even if some readers find it obvious—that their teaching objective is broader. The performance is a purposeful rehearsal of Catalan collective awareness, a way to engage their pupils as participants in the Catalan identity of the teachers and parents. Parents, of course, are charmed by such exhibitions, although their investment also goes beyond love for their own kids. As witnesses to the performance, the parents give tacit approval to their children’s socialization. The teachers’ ambitions, the parents’ assent, and the children’s playful reenactment all substantiate the political potency of the event. In total, it is a constructed consensus about the value of the past, renewed in the present, and put toward effecting a future purpose.

One example of the political meanings is as follows. “Jaume Primer Tenia Cent Soldats” is sung in Catalan, the language spoken by the Catalan people since its separation from other distinctive Romance languages more than a thousand years ago. Spanish governments from the eighteenth century until 1979 made it illegal to speak Catalan in public places like schools, and the central government at present continues to attempt to restrict its use. More on language in a later chapter, but consider this: Catalan is not one of the 24 languages officially recognized by the European Union (EU), although it is spoken by more people than speak fifteen of those other languages. The reason for the EU’s displacement of Catalan is simple: Spain’s obstinate refusal to allow the language to be accorded a status commensurate with the number of its speakers. Thus, in their act of reiterating the song, the children, the parents, and the teachers are participants in a history of acts of defiance against a Spanish state that has endeavored to suppress their language.

Beyond the significance of the historical personality of James I and the importance of singing a song about him in the Catalan mother tongue, the tune the children sing is borrowed from another nation that once upon a time acted rebelliously to gather its members under a banner of freedom. Americans will recognize the tune as the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” the patriotic song that recalls the persistence of post-Revolutionary unity beyond the hardships of the civil war fought within the United States of America. In the pages of this book we will encounter several examples of Catalans drawing heavily from American and English precedents as they recall and shape their own cultural identity. As one would expect, most lessons of Catalan collectivity are heard in Catalan (and almost never in Castilian Spanish, for reasons that will become apparent), but Catalans often use English because that language reaches the greatest number of external observers who might empathize and offer aid to the Catalan cause.

Socialization requires that societies make choices about remembering and forgetting. All societies ask their members to recall some elements of the past and ignore others. The example of children singing “Jaume Primer Tenia Cent Soldats” illustrates how Catalans recall certain parts of their past in just the ways that can be most beneficial to them. The performance of the marching child conquerors also demonstrates why Catalan schools count among the most fiercely contested battlegrounds in the fight between Catalans and the foes of Catalan historical memory. Members of Spain’s governments, over several centuries, have shown that they would prefer Catalan children to learn different stories, an alternative set of facts and legends. Castilians would prefer that Catalans show themselves to be good Spaniards by, for instance, learning the story of Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, El Cid, who, according to Spanish lore, captured Valencia in 1096 as part a great Catholic Reconquest of Spain from the Moors. And Castilians want that story learned in Spanish (that is, in Castilian), not in Catalan.

(While El Cid was a real person, his reputation for Catholic and Spanish national zeal is overblown. He fought for and against Muslims, just as he fought for and against Christians. His reputation grew not because of his religiosity but because of his military and political sagacity. His pugnacity made him rich and famous. He gave no thought at all to Spain, since that political entity did not yet exist. In truth, he was a mercenary, looking for his own gain, which in his time came most effectively through territorial conquest, plunder, and extraction of tribute payments. “The Reconquest ,” into which the myth of El Cid was first interpolated, is itself a turgid myth.)

We see in the activities of the child replicators of James’s story, and in the alternative tale about El Cid, evidence of what social theorists call social or cultural reproduction. Social groups create rituals and stories, which they habitualize through participatory endeavors. Such collective performances create social solidarity, in part by giving present value to a reimagined past.

What should we make of such efforts at indoctrination? My college students initially recoil at the thought of them, as perhaps some of my readers are now doing. However, I remind my students, and I’ll remind my readers as well, that we all have participated in similar training exercises. There is no getting around the fact that we all undergo this kind of social brainwashing (some theorists prefer to call it habituation). It isn’t all bad, of course. It makes sense that the parents and teachers of young children want to inform their kids about the history of the place where they live and the people who have shaped that place. Those of us living in the US want our own children to learn about Plymouth Rock and the pilgrims’ first Thanksgiving, the singular event that in our collective memory foretells the bounty in store for inheritors of the American experiment. We embellish Thanksgiving with stuffed turkeys and pumpkin pies, ignoring the fact that nearly half of the first arrivals of Plymouth died over the first winter. We want to instruct future generations about George Washington’s leadership of our nation during its infancy. If Washington’s story gets elaborated with details about cherry trees and wooden teeth, we might agree that there is no harm done, since the goal is to make an important piece of history stick in hard heads. And, most certainly, we want this done in English, not Italian or Polish or Cherokee or Catalan.

Identity

Identity is an important subtheme of the book. We are all members of groups. It is common nowadays to refer to these as “imagined communities.”³ What we mean by the term is that our various groupings, associations, and constituencies are held together by our ideas about what should hold them together and by the practices that put those ideas into action. Collective imagination and habitual cohesiveness provide much of the glue that binds. If that sounds circular, and a little bit fragile, so it is.

We all play roles in multiple identity groups. We take possession of a variety of identities at a variety of scales with various scopes of interest. Sometimes the intersections of these disparate identities are worth noting. Families are identity groups. Many Catalan families take weekend excursions, often to sites like the Romanesque churches high in the Pyrenees that have special prominence as symbols of Catalonia’s medieval heritage. Family trips, then, are not merely recreational. They serve to consolidate the family group while also confirming Catalan identity. There is something powerful in the simple circularity of it: This is what Catalan families do when they want to signal to themselves and others that they are Catalan families. An outsider to Catalonia finds it odd and surprising to see so many of these kinds of convergences of activities that bring multiple identities into alignment. In Catalonia, neighborhoods can also share a strong sense of collective purpose. The practice in Catalonia of building human towers (castells in Catalan) is predominantly organized as a neighborhood activity. But there are castellers and observers of castle-building events in neighborhoods all over Catalonia. These neighborhood activities are almost entirely independent of each other; nonetheless, they share a set of thoughts and practices by which their practitioners and audiences knowingly link themselves to the past, present, and future of the activity, which they see as distinctly Catalan. In this activity, neighborhood and nation are intimately bound together. We will see other examples.

The reality of identity politics is, of course, more complex than the charming picture of kindergarteners recalling their nation’s history in song or neighborhood friends climbing upon each other’s backs in a castle-building exercise. A voting bloc is an identity group, and voting blocs, as history routinely instructs us, can be unkind to those who espouse rival interests. In Spain, as in the US, the lines of political division drawn by dominant groups often do not readily fit the minority populations upon whom they are drawn. Religious groups are also identity groups. Christians, Muslims, and Jews have much in common, although it is more typical for religious affiliates to look for the characteristics that separate one religious group from another. No one disputes that we group the people around us by carefully calibrating the subtle shades of similarity and difference. Catalans are Catalans because they see themselves as such and build a worldview around who they think they are. But Catalans are also Catalans because others tell them they are different. Prejudices matter: They draw people together, and they also cause pain and division.

One more thing about identity: Theorists say it has a lot to do with memory. Just what constitutes a memory is not always easy to discern. Sometimes a memory is an accurate impression of what really occurred, but just as often it is a poor recollection or a total fabrication. Prejudices, as suggested above, are often little more than evocations of some partial or fictional memory. Memories link us in rich ways to perceptions of an ancestral past, a past that we did not live and, thus, technically speaking, cannot remember. Practically speaking, memories very often have little to do with what really happened long ago and much more to do with getting something going in the present.

Medieval and Medievalizing

I assert in this book that to be Catalan is to be possessed by memories of the med...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Back Matter