31/03/2014
Miguel Angel Quintanilla Navarro. Director of the Publishing Department of FAES Foundation
The following text was sent to newspaper El Pais, Catalonia edition, on 21 March. On the 26th it dismissed its publication:
On March 21, Joan B. Culla i Clará wrote an article for this newspaper entitled 'Ethnicists', which considered that a text signed by me and published in the series "Analysis" of FAES Foundation was sliding 'down the slope of ethnicity' and was an expression of 'tank' (I suppose in the sense of battle tank, incorrect) and not of 'think'. I should remind the reader that in it, entitled 'Who lives in Catalonia'?, an objective statistical fact was shown with hardly any comment about it: Spain's National Institute of Statistics establishes that the most common surnames of the people living in Catalonia are also the most common among those living in any other Spanish province, and obviously in the whole of Spain.
Culla i Clará's article does not include a clear definition of 'ethnicity', but there is an approximate definition contained in this sentence: 'It is indeed the grossest ethnicity to assume that if the most common surnames in Barcelona and Madrid are the same, their carriers must share identical feelings of identity ascription'.
Accepting this definition approach to the concept of ethnicity, I must say that I agree with Culla: assuming that just because a person has a certain surname we can establish what he or she thinks about something is absurd, a gross ethnicity. Therefore I do not affirm it but indeed refuse it. As I also think it's absurd and reject it, to believe–and force the political imposition of that belief over the right–that two people have to have mutually exclusive and incompatible feelings of identity ascription by the fact of living in Barcelona or Madrid. And this is what Culla says, and with him, the whole Catalan secessionism. And they do not say this of Barcelona and Paris, or Barcelona and London, for example; no. they only say it of Barcelona or elsewhere in Catalonia and Madrid or elsewhere in the rest of Spain. This is indeed ethnicity. Not quite the grossest of them, because I can think of some others which are worse, but it does slide toward them down the slope of nonsense.
I think what Culla and I disagree on is not the rejection of ethnicity based on surnames, an idea we share, but on the fact that I reject that ethnicity and all the rest, and he does not. Therefore, there are ethnicists. Culla is one of them.
But the INE has created a problem for his ethnicity. That is, it has created it for the reality of what Catalan society truly is. A problem for those who assert that secessionism is majoritarian and crosses all sectors of society, because as it has been proved that 'immigrant' surnames–according to his concept, what generation is no longer considered an immigrant there?–are predominant in Catalonia, it has to be accepted that these are part of the 'national process'. Because if not, 'a priori', it doesn't add up. He thinks I say that having the surname García or Gómez vaccines against ethnicity, but I don't say that. That's why he believes he's refuting me–the INE–when he says that one can be an ethnicist and Garcia at once. I know that's possible. But I also know it's not necessary. Set to fake, a Culla can falsify the same as a López, but nothing forces a López or a Culla–or a Valls or a Bau, to mention the surnames he mentions in his article–to accept the deception promoted by nationalism. And in fact, many don't.
It is he who believes that being Catalan forges a closed identity. I am the one who believes that being Catalan offers–for Culla and López–a starting point and an overwhelming cultural heritage, due to its richness and depth, with which to forge a biography that even a person from Madrid could cherish, share and defend. We have won something with the INE: Culla accepts that Garcias may be Catalan in the sense he gives to that word, if only because otherwise, it would not add up. The only thing missing now is that they can also be Catalan in the sense that the European Union gives to that word.
But the most important part of Joan B. Culla i Clará's article is this. His great problem is that wrapped in the symptomatic nervous abruptness permeating his text he has slipped a substantive issue that cannot be easily solved. He says: 'FAES and its brainy advisers have discovered that between 1890 and 1980 approximately, Catalonia received nearly two million immigrants coming from the rest of the country. It's not really a first but anyway, congratulations!'
Let's leave aside the style. Let's leave aside even the reason for this migration. Let's go to what's most important: if the Garcias came to Catalonia as of 1890 and, if at the same time, the Catalan nation is ancient and will commemorate 1714, then what exactly are the Garcías celebrating and as part of what? No problem accepting that the surname does not prevent the identity assignment to Catalan ethnicity. Quite the opposite, it is a relief to know that this idea still circulates with relative ease between nationalists. But I refuse–surely here emerges the tank in me–to question that 1890 comes after 1714. And my think does not understand that the Catalan identity of those who arrived in 1890 can be traced back to 1714, let alone to earlier times.
In other words, Culla has publicly challenged, and if not I challenge him, to accept one of two things: either the Catalan nationality of which the Garcías are part of was built as of 1890–and how and who and why–or, if earlier, the Garcias are 'ascribed' but 'are' not Catalan. And in the latter case, this whole identity story would only be but a convoluted sophistication, impudent and not as funny as the jest 'we Bilbao people are born wherever we want'. That is, an old joke mutated into national history.