“The only Spanish thing about me is my identity card.” That is one of the first things Pau told us. We met the former Catalan independence activist in Celra, a village near Girona in Catalonia, where he grew up. Catalan independence has been a point of contention for centuries. As soon as you set foot in this region of northern Spain, it’s easy to understand why its inhabitants see Catalonia as a nation in its own right, with a distinct language, flag, culture, architecture and customs.
After numerous political attempts to establish Catalonia as an independent territory, young Catalans have now turned to culture to fight for their identity.
Celebrating Catalan identity at Cabro Rock
To see this for ourselves, we travelled to Vic, the town that hosts the Cabro Rock festival every year. The aim of this festival is to promote Catalan music and identity. Once we arrived we quickly realised that here, Catalan is king. It was almost impossible to get a reply in Castilian, Spain’s official national language, and hundreds of red and yellow-striped flags flew among the food trucks and drinks stalls.
“Visca Barça and Visca Catalunya lliure!”, chanted Joan as he welcomed us to the festival. Joan, alias KZU Music, was performing as a DJ on the night we went to Cabro Rock. He has been pro-independence since childhood, and his way to express it has always been music and language. A couple of years ago he made a name for himself on social media by remixing traditional Catalan music. For the 27-year-old artist, preserving his language is a political act: “Under my posts [on social media], there are lots of comments saying: ‘You’re doing more for the Catalan language and for Catalonia than most Catalan politicians’,” said the DJ with a smile.
Festival-goers seek out this event precisely to show their engagement with the Catalonian cause: “Now that there are so many Catalan bands, we need to support them. […] I think it’s good that not everything happens in Barcelona. We’re from central Catalonia, and it’s cool to see that that’s appreciated too. It’s very important!”
A political standstill
The atmosphere at Cabro Rock was festive, but Catalans have endured years of political struggles, which have often ended up in violent confrontations.
On October 1, 2017, despite the Spanish government’s crackdown on the vote, more than two million Catalan people participated in the referendum that would decide on the region’s independence status.
At the time, Pau was part of an extremely active pro-independence student union that helped organise the referendum. “I think that in 2017, the general feeling was that we couldn’t get anything from Spain, that it would make no concessions…This project of independence allowed us, in the first place, to freely decide on the future of Catalonia, to know if it would become an independent state. But it also had the goal of bringing more democratic change, bettering education, healthcare… A number of issues that we thought we could work on with independence.”
But the Spanish government did not take it well. The referendum was declared unconstitutional, Catalonia’s autonomy was suspended and direct rule was imposed in the region. This resulted in unprecedented protests as people rose up in dissent.
“Looking back, what I feel is pride in the people from my town and in Catalans in general for what we have achieved. I think it was one of the most important and massive demonstrations that Europe has seen in the past several years. For me, it’s an act of civil disobedience which, considering the number of people who came together and the way it happened, was pretty much unprecedented in Europe,” recalled Pau.
Two years after this unprecedented event, on October 14, 2019, 12 of the Catalan leaders who had organised the referendum were tried, with some facing charges of sedition and embezzlement of public funds. Nine were convicted.
It was at this point that many pro-independence activists began to turn their backs on politics, weary of their leaders’ broken promises and the lack of renewal within the pro-independence political class.
Reviving their language
Today, Pau believes that the only thing left for young people in his region to fight for is their language: “Due to the boom in tourism in Barcelona, it has become increasingly difficult to do things in Catalan. In other words, when I go there, I sometimes find myself in situations where people don’t understand me when I order a coffee in Catalan. But I think it’s also up to the authorities to ensure that everyone can address us in our language, so that we can be welcomed at hospitals, in pharmacies and in bars, in Catalan,” said the activist.
But Pau noted that more and more young people are committed to saving Catalan: “Nowadays, many young people, even those who don’t talk about independence, talk a lot about the language. They make music in Catalan, produce films in Catalan, or create TikTok content exclusively in Catalan. That gives us hope.”
This mission to preserve Catalan language and culture could breathe new life into the independence movement. That, at any rate, is what Joan hopes: “My hope for Catalonia is that people start realising that Catalan is our language, that they understand that if we don’t speak it, nobody will. That it’s super important to speak everyday, to make everybody who comes here understand that our language is Catalan. And of course, at some point, I would love to think that we will get independence.”
Today, Catalan is spoken by more than 10 million people in Europe, including more than eight million in Spain, mainly in Catalonia. However, this language is still neither recognised as a national language of Spain nor of the EU; it is merely an official regional language. The Catalan people’s fight for recognition continues on the cultural battlefield.
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