The invisible Catalan working class

In half a century of elections, there has never been a lack of Catalan left-wing politicians asking for votes like Ada Colau did in her interview with Jordi Wild: “The working-class neighborhoods of Barcelona were built with their own hands by the working people who came from Extremadura and Andalusia, and they called them 'xarnegos', and at the beginning they had to endure comments: like they were dirty, like they were poor... And the local bourgeoisie treated them like 'these people coming from outside, who do they think they are?' and like someone second-class.”

As much as this reduction is based on real events, the problem is that it is always the same reduction of reality. The farmers who came down to Barcelona from all parts of Catalonia (take the portrait that Maria Barbal makes of the immigration coming from the Pallars in Pedra de tartera) never appear. And even less so the thousands and thousands of Catalan workers in the factories of Poblenou or Sabadell and Terrassa, as if the reception committee for Andalusians and Extremadurans (or Aragonese, like my grandfather) had only been treacherous bourgeois with pearl tie pins and an apartment for the mistress. As if they hadn't found athenaeums, unions, dance groups, hiking centers, sports clubs, or parishes here where they could integrate into the life of the Catalan working classes. Not to mention the amount of hard work my parents did, both born in Barcelona, just like many of my classmates' parents at the school in Gràcia.

This invisibilization ends up being a caricature when it is topped off with idealization: “And it is very beautiful to see that in the working-class neighborhoods of Barcelona, it is these people who have the memory of emigration who, when they hear racist speeches in their neighborhood, come out to say: 'No, the problem is not the foreigner, but the criminal'.” Look at the votes Vox gets there.