Some news from this week in regards to attacks against the Catalan-Valencian culture and language:
The City Council of Alacant (the 2nd most populated city in the Valencian Country) has decided that from now on they are changing the spring school holidays to exclude local Valencian traditional days of celebration. Instead, they move it to Spanish Catholic days of celebration. Families will no longer be able to celebrate dia de la mona, instead they'll have free the early Holy Week. Another attempt to stop the tramission of the local culture and impose the Spanish culture.
In Catalonia, the supreme judge has dictated that all schools must now have their signs in Spanish. Until now, schools in Catalonia had the signs in Catalan (except in the Aran Valley, where they are in Aranese Occitan), as the language of education is Catalan (or Aranese Occitan). For the last decade, a series of laws by the Spanish government and rulings by the supreme judges have imposed a higher presence of Spanish outside the subject of Spanish, by law at least 25% of classes must be in Spanish, though in most schools the number is much higher. Some right-wing associations of parents have also sued schools and teachers if they considered there was too much Catalan, even when the amount was following the law. (Remember that it was already mandatory for all students to take the subject of Spanish Language and Literature, which has as many hours as Catalan Language and Literature, so it's not like Spanish isn't present). It is important to have Catalan in schools because it's the only way to guarantee that all people who have been raised here will know it. Everyone will learn Spanish as a first language outside of school anyway (since the streaming platforms, cinemas, internet, TV channels, etc. are almost exclusively in Spanish and there is the social pressure for Catalan speakers to address Spanish speakers in Spanish, but not the other way around), but since about 50% of Catalonia's young people were born outside Catalonia and Spain, it is necessary to welcome them into a school system where they can learn the local language. Without it, they won't, and Catalan will in a couple of generations suddenly become a minority. For a language that has also been persecuted, illegalized, and treated as inferior for most of its recent history, it is important that people can see the language in formal settings, see that it can be adequate for "important" stuff too, and not continue propagating the idea that "Spanish is for important/public things, Catalan is only to speak at home".
In the town l'AlcĂşdia de Crespins (also in the Valencian Country), the high school is named after the writer Isabel-Clara SimĂł, a key figure in Valencian literature. Now, the City Council has censored the name. They have removed the name, accusing the writer of being divisive (because she wrote in the Valencian-Catalan language and defended her right to do so).
Today, 7 more pro-independence people from Catalonia have been sentenced guilty for having taken part in a demonstration against the far-right Spanish supremacist group Sociedad Civil Catalana when they were hosting an event in a university campus under the excuse of doing a homage to Cervantes (Spanish writer seen as a national symbol). Even though the police report clearly states that it was the far-right Catalanophobic group who started shouting and pushing the counter-demonstrators trying to start a fight, the judge has considered that demonstrating against them is a criminal offense, and has added the plus of hate crime against Spain, because of the far-right's excuse of doing a homage to the symbol of Spanish culture Cervantes.
Amidst the protests against overtourism+gentrification in Mallorca, the Spanish military police has gone to the homes of two protestors and arrested them handcuffed, accusing them of being members of a criminal gang that targets real estate agencies. They are accused of having spray painted the façades of 5 real estate agencies, and the "proof" of their "criminal involvement" is that they had a banner that reads "SOS inhabitants. Stop overtourism!" at home. The military police have threatened that everyone who "commits crimes against Mallorca's touristic interests will be arrested". And yes, I'm including this in a post about attacks against culture because there can be no culture if the community is expelled from its home island to make way for rich Germans to buy second homes to leave empty half the year. 50% of houses in many towns of Mallorca are already owned by foreigners who don't live in the island. Just in the street where these two girls who have been arrested live, there are 5 real estate agencies. How does this make sense? Dictator Franco's plan was to turn Mallorca into a tourism colony, and years after his death the plan is still taking place.
Recently it feels like every week is like this. Little by little, Spanish nationalism tries to impose its homogenizing presence by excluding the places where the local language and culture is expressed. The things I've included in this post are not even the most impactful things that have happened lately, I would be depressed if I had to post it every time. Changing the names of towns and cities to Spanish names, changing the names of schools and theatres, not giving permissions to host traditional holidays on the streets, removing the requisite of knowing Catalan to work in even more high-education sectors of Catalonia, families having to appeal to court to let them name their children in Catalan because the state-worker doesn't want them to, forbidding Catalan authors from the literature school curriculum in the Valencian Country... The previous week even the company Aticco fired a worker speaking in Catalan to clients in their office in Barcelona, Catalonia's capital city (the firing notice stated that this was the reason). We need to stay firm and not let them erase our existence! Language rights and culture rights are human rights, even if they're not recognised by the law of an oppressor and imperialist state.
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