The bastard children of October 1st

There are many ways to divide Catalonia, but the most naive is the one that draws a line between "real Catalonia" and all invented or synecdochic Catalonias. There are people who believe they have discovered the DNA of authentic Catalanism at the Feria de Abril, organized by the powerful and doped lobby of Andalusian entities, where the rebujito and flamenco are starting to clash with the mojito and reggaeton (because, for the defenders of real Catalonia, plurality is synonymous with hispanicity and nothing more). From which it can be deduced that, if by an improbable migratory phenomenon, half a million Catalans were to move to live in Andalusia and a casteller group called Los Chiquitos de Fuengirola were formed there, a 4 of 9 with folre i manilles would be as Andalusian as the pilgrimage to El Rocío.It is as absurd to put the April Fair into the bag of Catalan culture as it would be to put the Oktoberfest and flamenco begin to stumble over the bourgeois.For this reason, the failure of the sovereignist process, with the marvellous swan song that was October 1st, constitutes a national drama: it was the occasion for Catalonia to take a step forward in a climate of democratic celebration and respect for plurality that had nothing to do with the system of punishment and repression that successive Spanish governments have imposed before and since. An independent Catalonia, or at least more sovereign, could it have managed its plurality better than it currently does? Resoundingly, yes. But the weakness of the sovereignist leaders and the inflexibility of the Spanish powers made impossible a country agreement, democratic yet plural, regarding individual and collective identities.That failure was not only of the sovereignists, but of the whole country, and also of a Spanishness(that of the real Spain?) which in the end needed the police and the judges to prevail. Now we are paying the consequences. We have public services in a mess, a situation of plunder that no one bothers to deny, and a vital but increasingly minoritized language. And above all, we have a disillusioned native element, which has lost the generosity of October 1st, and which in part has allowed itself to be seduced by the siren songs of the far-right. After the victory of batons over ballot boxes, did anyone expect anything else? It is very curious that those who most exclaim about the 'orriolista' rise are those who have made it grow, by subordinating Catalan identity to Spanish identity and beheading the democratic sovereignist parties, with a cynically conformist shrug of the shoulders –it's the market, friend–. And they will call us supremacists... How dare they!