Eduard Sola: "The generation above us all speaks Spanish, and ours speaks Catalan."

BarcelonaWhen the screenwriter Eduard Sola won the Gaudí by House on fire He remembered his humble origins, "proudly charnego." And when he won the Goya, he dedicated it to the "super mothers" who, like his own, have sacrificed everything for their children. "Mom, that's for you. I love you so much," he said in Catalan. Two months later, we meet with Eduard Sola and his parents, now over the whirlwind of awards and the hangover from the political debate that arose from the word charnego.

José Antonio Sola and Sebastiana Guerrero, Sebi, have come down from Santa Eulalia de Ronçana to be the elders of Emília (5) and Jan (1) in the Sants neighborhood. Their family is one of many children of Andalusian immigrants who integrated into Catalan identity in the second generation, to the point that when their son was born in 1989, they named him Eduard and spoke to him in Catalan. "Between us, we continued speaking in Spanish and to the boy, in Catalan, but without any problem. We said, 'So that he's more integrated, since we're in Catalonia, let him speak the language from here, that his friends will be Catalan.' It wasn't premeditated or anything," explains Sebi, who continued speaking with the whole family - parents, in-laws, and sisters. "My aunts also made this unconscious decision regarding my cousins. The generation above us all speaks in Spanish, and ours, all in Catalan," says Sola. This is an intra-family linguistic change that occurred at the same time in other homes.

Sebi's family had settled in the mining colonies of Sallent, where Catalan was non-existent. When Sebi moved to a small village in the Vallès region of just a few thousand inhabitants, at the age of 7, he encountered Catalan. "I didn't understand anything. It took me a while, maybe three months, because I immediately made friends and they were all Catalan, everything was in Catalan," he recalls.

José Antonio lived in the cheap houses from Granollers, which was then an exclusively Spanish-speaking neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. She heard Catalan when she started working at a pharmacy in the city center at the age of 14. These were two parallel paths that intersected. "We met speaking Spanish, and when you start learning a language, you've already messed up; you don't change it. I don't know how to say 'I love you' to my husband; I say 'I love you"I just can't seem to say it. I can say it to my son: 'I love you so much,'" she says, returning the award dedication.

"What am I looking for for my son?"

At no point did they experience the change as a renunciation. Looking back, if you think about why they decided to speak a language other than their native language to their son, the answer lies outside the home: "It was easy. My work environment, the mothers at school, the town, the local festivals... Everything we did was in Catalan," says Guerrero. The son sees that geography was key to integration, a condition that is difficult to replicate today to integrate later waves of immigrants, because they encounter less Catalanized environments.

"There was also a deeper political issue involved," notes Eduard Sola. "I'm from '89, during the Pujol era. There has always been a Spanish-speaking upper class, without a doubt, but in those early '90s there was clearly a demand for good Catalan. And the good Catalan It means a well-off class. And although [Catalan] is an unconscious issue and due to the context, I think there's also this in their mind. When you make parenting decisions, you undoubtedly say: "What am I looking for for my child? I'm looking for the best." And there's a model, which is the good Catalan, who's doing well, who's educated, who has a good salary, who speaks Catalan. Well, let's give him Catalan."

What's happening in the fourth generation of Solas is exactly the opposite. The clean one, who is "Catalan-speaking and Catalan-thinking," is socializing at school and in the Sants neighborhood primarily in Spanish. "No one has spoken to my daughter in Spanish at home, and today she's 5 years old and speaks perfectly. And you say: 'There's no need to make an effort for people to learn Spanish. Spanish is in the world, Spanish always wins the game.'" That's why Sola celebrates her parents' change, which today represents a grain of sand to save the language: "The decision they made is the obvious one, that is, Spanish doesn't need another speaker; it automatically wins."

Charneguismo today

The word charnego It was the one that set off alarm bells after Eduard Sola's speech at the Gaudí festival. He explains it this way: "For me, charneguismo is a matter of the working class of a specific era located in a specific place." And this doesn't mean he contrasts the working-class charnego with the idea of a bourgeois Catalan. "At the same time my grandparents were starving, the same people were starving in the Pyrenees. My grandmother searched for potato peels in the garbage, and I assure you there were many Catalans with all the Catalan surnames who did the same," he says.

Sola assures that claiming to be a charnego is not a reproach: "It's almost the opposite. I feel sorry, with all my heart, that there is a Catalan who thinks that the word charnego "It's pejorative for this Catalan. On the contrary, it seems to me that claiming charnego pride is thanking the Catalans who were already there for their collective effort, which has made us lifelong Catalans today," says Solà, who tries to tread carefully so as "not to get into trouble," aware that it's a word loaded with interpretations.

Neither Sola nor her mother say they felt excluded because of their family origins. "This charnego thing never worried me. I was integrated right away," says Sebi. "They opened their arms to me." We're not allowed to do anything, and that has a price for us, and it's legitimate for us to claim it. For example, I went to Chess, and Chess cost a lot of money. They didn't get up at five in the morning. This, in the end, creates a kind of wound, which is there and nothing happens, we don't commit hara-kiri, but it generates a mark and when we say "proudly charnegos" we refer to this effort, to the fact that we have made it. worked, to pride in our own and collective efforts, because without public schools we wouldn't have gotten ahead, without a society that welcomes, that cares for us. And can we call that working-class pride? Yes. And specifically, ours is working-class pride, because we come from these charnegos," says Sola. "No one," he concludes. "When we identify a newcomer who speaks Catalan, we embrace them tightly. And when we identify a newcomer who doesn't speak it, we must make an effort to get them to speak it. This is what the Catalan with eight Catalan surnames has done all his life, and he's done it very well."