A Vox flyer arrives at an independence chat. A school classroom with the crescent moon and star symbol above the blackboard. “The Parliament of Catalonia supports an agreement with the Arab League to promote Arabic in schools, with the only opposition from Vox.” In the chat, a civil servant, mother of a large family and who has gone from voting to ERC, to the CUP and lately to Junts, writes: “My goodness… not a euro for pedagogues, math teachers, Catalan, etc., and yes for Arabic teachers. Let's vote for Aliança Catalana, let's see if they present themselves to the Gene.”
While Aliança plucks the daisy and waits for an injection of funds, Vox is campaigning for it. The agenda, slogans and concerns of the Spanish extreme right, although despite some, coincide with those of independence extremism, changing Spain for Catalonia. There is nothing more similar to a nationalist than another nationalist. In the chat environment, the expression “we will end up like the Sioux” has been used for years.
Last week, interviewed by this newspaper, Eduardo Mendoza said that “the people of Barcelona are like the Indians of a reservation, and everything else is colonization. And I like it that way, it seems like a good way to renew.” The writer embodies cosmopolitanism, but the majority of Barcelonans have not lived in New York or London nor do they see the point of colonization.
Some of these Barcelona residents already visit their grandchildren in the suburbs because their children do not have a roof over their heads in Barcelona, which residents with foreign salaries do have access to. They go to saturated CAPs and from now on they will have to watch the tap while for months tourists (especially luxury ones) have consumed up to five times more water than them.
These, the independence official and the Vox voters, played Indians and cowboys as children. And, as usual, they often fought with their friends to embody the first, more peculiar and colorful ones. Until, as adults, they understood the destiny of the American Indians. Today they are overcome with fear when changes that they do not understand occur in their environment at breakneck speed.
So they keep the romanticism, they assume that it is better to be a cowboy and for others to be the Indians. And while they see that their lament is not attended to, but belittled and ridiculed, they channel the depth of common sense and justice that their concerns have by supporting extreme political formations that will not solve their problems, but that comfort them with their propaganda.
Among those who fear ending up like the Sioux and the cosmopolitan vision of a thin but influential and often powerful social layer—not our writer, of course—there are thousands of people in search of a home to stop being outcasts. The tension between these three vectors marks our time more than at any other time in history. Daily politicking, however, prevents us from giving it the attention it deserves. And this is not a shame, but a mistake.
