When I appealed last week to a new intelligence—I could also have said a new imaginary—to refer to the migration processes our country is experiencing, what I meant was that we must know how to speak about social reality appropriately. That there are old concepts that don't fit the new realities. That concepts should be adapted to reality, not the other way around. That we must think in a way that brings us as close as possible to the facts—and, if possible, to the truth—especially those that are most conflicting and disturbing to us. That we must avoid masking or mystifying reality, whether it's done intentionally to make it more obvious or in bad faith to alarm us and take advantage of it.
And we could say the same about another concept that is almost invariably associated with immigration: identity. So to speak, identity is no longer what it used to be. In more stable societies, there were more enduring, more homogeneous, and more widely shared ways of being and living. There were family identities, for example, that lasted for several generations associated with a name, or bad name, linked to the house. But in societies that are so open, so changing—more gaseous than liquid—so heterogeneous, what is identity? And this is both at the general level, as it may be at the national level, and at the strictly personal level, where mid-life crises are increasingly frequent, leading to "depending on the journey," as has sometimes been said.
Old ways of thinking about identity lead us to serious confusions in understanding and acting upon reality. Needless to say, essentialist conceptions—such as "what it means to be a man," "what it means to be young," or "what it means to be Catalan"—fall flat when we now attempt to provide a precise answer. Even a good aphorism like "Whoever loses their origins loses their identity," which in a given social and political context has had a critical and rebellious meaning, could be considered racist by some fool outside of time and place. The phrase makes sense when faced with someone who tries to erase their origins—history, language...—to make us disappear as a people. Agreed. But what if the nostalgic maintenance of mystified origins—whether those of the natives or those of outsiders—becomes a barrier to building new belongings in the service of creating a civic and supportive community? How can you achieve patriotic adherence to a history or loyalty to a language when they are not your originals?
We are a society in which it is difficult to say not only what we are, but what we have been. Have we been the cowardly silence of the long years of Franco's regime or the courage of the minorities who resisted? Are we the now-dying hope of independence, or are we a society resigned to reconcile with the repressor of our rights? Are we the enterprising society determined to create wealth and jobs despite adversity, or are we the we say hornbeam Of the masses thirsty for perpetual celebration?
The use of old concepts to designate new realities explains where many misunderstandings come from, and creates confusion when they are used to build the future. The xenophobic far right, in addition to hatred, with its words recounts and sells a chimerical past, fortunately, impossible to reconstruct. But also, and beyond the crude political manipulation carried out by the left here and there, branding it as racist, when the Junts deputy Míriam Nogueras, in the reasoned demand for immigration powers, mentioned the necessary "survival of our identity," the term survival referred, confusingly and unnecessarily, to the past. And, much worse –although curiously without causing any political allergies–, Feijóo has dared to appeal to the Spanishness To say that I would favor immigration based on identity proximity, I suppose due to a language and not a colonizing past, which confirms the desire for linguistic substitution where we have another of our own. An idea rounded off by Ayuso when she said that Hispanic immigration is not immigration. And, by the way, isn't the cosmopolitan rhetoric of the extreme left of Podemos, insensitive to all genocides except one, Eurocentric identity racism?
It is not in a few hasty lines that we can respond to the challenges I point out here. But from old identities with essentialist pretensions and anchored in a past that is little or very mystified, we must start thinking about identities oriented toward the future, built on common and supportive hopes, where people of diverse origins and paths can find us in order to be able to establish the necessary links to make individuality and the nose prosper.
