The other Catalans

One night when we went to give a sick man an in­jec­tion in a ten­e­ment hous­ing 14 peo­ple, we had to tip-toe so as not to step on any­one, and above all not wake those who had to start work early the next day... In one bed there were four peo­ple sleep­ing like sar­dines in a tin, head-to-toe. That is why in the sum­mer you see many peo­ple in those places sleep­ing in the street. These arrange­ments, with their ef­fects on moral­ity, of lax­ity, neg­li­gence and aban­don­ment, de­stroy fam­ily life.”

This ex­cerpt is from the book, Els al­tres cata­lans by Francesc Can­del, which was first pub­lished 50 years ago. It is a very Can­de­lesque de­scrip­tion, fo­cus­ing on the harsh liv­ing con­di­tions in one of thou­sands of run­down ten­e­ments that were typ­i­cal in the sub­urbs of Barcelona. Half a cen­tury later, the slums have gone and their in­hab­i­tants are now sim­ply Cata­lans.

Since its pub­li­ca­tion, Can­del's book has be­came a point of ref­er­ence in the con­tro­ver­sial his­tory of the ar­rival in Cat­alo­nia of mi­grants from all over Spain. In Feb­ru­ary, an event by the Gen­er­al­i­tat and the Fun­dació Francesc Can­del led the trib­utes of Can­del, with Artur Mas mak­ing the point that Cata­lan so­ci­ety today is the same one the writer de­scribes: “70% of Cata­lans were born out­side Cat­alo­nia or have par­ents born out­side,” he said.

Can­del, who was raised in the in­fa­mous dis­trict of Can Tunis, next to Mon­tjuïc ceme­tery, knew well those sad, poverty-rid­den urban nooks in which lived an un­for­tu­nate mi­grant pop­u­la­tion, for­got­ten by the dic­ta­tor­ship and looked down on by the Cata­lan mid­dle classes. The com­mer­cial suc­cess that Can­del's book en­joyed, which en­gen­dered the whole con­cept of 'The other Cata­lans', was an im­pres­sive feat for the time.

Dur­ing those years, the out­ly­ing ghetto areas of all Cata­lan cities, and in par­tic­u­lar Barcelona's met­ro­pol­i­tan area, con­tin­ued to grow, often chaot­i­cally and with ter­ri­ble liv­ing con­di­tions, due to the con­tin­u­ous ar­rival of thou­sands of peo­ple from Spain's poor­est re­gions. In the 1950s, Can­del tells us, this growth of the ghet­tos was one of the coun­try's most se­ri­ous prob­lems, while the dic­ta­tor­ship did noth­ing to rem­edy it: “It was mon­strous,” he con­cludes.

As the years passed, the pat­tern was re­peated, spread­ing be­yond Barcelona. The coun­try saw an in­flux of poor mi­grants look­ing for work in Cat­alo­nia's in­dus­tries, will­ing to put up with mis­er­able liv­ing con­di­tions, and yet often able to pay their chil­dren through uni­ver­sity.

“Those non-Cata­lan chil­dren,” writes Can­del, “set down roots in a land that was not of their grand­fa­thers. They ab­sorb the sap and plant a seed.”

Nev­er­the­less, this process of plant­ing roots was not easy. Many mi­grants felt badly treated by na­tive Cata­lans and, as Can­del shows, there was “ten­sion be­tween those from dif­fer­ent places and those that con­sid­ered them­selves to be na­tives.”

Since the end of the 19th cen­tury, Cat­alo­nia has been a place that has at­tracted mi­grants, and today there are more than 1.4 mil­lion mi­grants in the coun­try who were born in other parts of Spain, ac­cord­ing to Idescat fig­ures. Most came from An­dalu­sia, Castilla y León, Ex­tremadura, Aragón and La Man­cha. From 1910 on­wards, the ar­rival of mi­grants from the south of Spain began to grow, thanks to in­dus­try, with the phe­nom­e­non peak­ing fol­low­ing the Civil War. In 1964, ac­cord­ing to the Cen­tre d'Es­tudis De­mogràfics, for the first time half of the pop­u­la­tion of Cat­alo­nia had mi­grant ori­gins. From 1970, the trend changed and mi­gra­tion from other areas of Spain began to wane. De­mog­ra­pher, Anna Cabré, has shown in her ar­ti­cles that the pop­u­la­tion of Cat­alo­nia in 2010 would never have grown above 2.4 mil­lion if it had not been for the mi­gra­tions, and that Cat­alo­nia's eco­nomic and so­cial growth in the lat­ter part of the 20th cen­tury would have been im­pos­si­ble if it had not been for the cheap labour sup­plied by mi­grants.

Can­del's book is al­most a work of jour­nal­ism in the way it ex­poses un­ac­cept­able so­cial and work­ing con­di­tions, but it is also a timely re­flec­tion on is­sues of con­tem­po­rary im­por­tance, such as the ques­tion of in­te­gra­tion, lan­guage and Cata­lan na­tion­al­ism. Fifty years since its pub­li­ca­tion, the other Cata­lans, and their de­scen­dants, will con­tinue to play a key and le­git­i­mate role in de­cid­ing the fu­ture of Cat­alo­nia, what­ever their sur­name may be.