The Passing of the Xarnego-Immigrant: Post-Nationalism and the Ideologies of Assimilation in Catalonia

The Passing of the Xornegolmmigrant : Post-Nationalism and the Ideologies of Assimilation in Catalonia Teresa M. VÃœarós is Associate Professor of Romance Studies and Bass Fellow at Duke University. She has published numerous essays on cultural theory. Author ofEl mono del desencanto. Una crÃ-tica cultural de la transición (Madrid: SigbXXI, 1998)andGaldós: Invención de la mujer y poética de la sexualidad (Madrid' Siglo XXI, 1995). She is cofounder editor ofthe]o\xtnal of Spanish Cultural Studies, and currently working on a book on the cultural politics of Franco's dictatorship during the sixties. As recorded in his 1997 memoir, José-Luis Bulla was a young man living in the small rural town of Santa Fe, Granada, when he immigrated to Catalonia in 1965. That year he bought a third-class ticket and rode North in the deteriorated "El Sevillano," as it was popularly known, the train that carried enormous waves of Southern Spanish immigrants from Seville to Barcelona. Like López-Bulla, throughout the sixties until the 1973 global oil crisis hundreds of thousands of impoverished peasants, unemployed rural Spanish men and women from Galicia to AndalucÃ-a, left behind farms, land, and petrified towns and villages. Internally , the migratory displacement moved to the industrialized cities of Catalonia and the Basque Country . Externally (and joining Portuguese and Turk rural workers) many Spaniards took the route towards Germany , Switzerland, and France, taking advantage of the bilateral pacts prompted by the European postwar economic boom of the '60s.1 The city of Barcelona served as the main destination . It was also a transfer port to foreign European nations, or to close-by Catalan cities like 1'Hospitalet del Llobregat, Terrasa, Santa Coloma, Sabadell, Sant Andreu, Viladecans, Gava, Bellvitge, and Mataró. It was in fact Mataró, the quintessential industrial Catalan city, where López-Bulla chose to start his life as an immigrant worker. Following a classic universal migratory pattern, his choice was not prompted by cultural Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 7, 2003 230 Arizona fournal of Hispanic Cultural Studies or historical knowledge of his point of destination, but rather by a particular net of social relations and work opportunities. As López-Bulla explains: Era igual el sitio concreto; por eso me pareció de perlas la oferta de un colega del dragaminas Genii—cuando yo hacÃ-a el servicio militar—que casualmente era socio de la empresa de cartonajes [en Mataró] en la que yo me ganar Ã-a la vida después [...]. Mataró serÃ-a mi Tierra Prometida. Lo único que sab Ã-a de esta ciudad era la historia del primer ferrocarril de España en 1848. (15) In spite of his a priori ignorance, once in place López-Bulla quickly absorbed the many Catalan cultural nuances of the Francoist period of the '60s. Soon after he arrived, he became the leader of the Comisiones Obreras (CCOO.) Marxist union and he embedded himself within a strongly politicized network.2 The 1959-1969 years of the Francoist dictatorship are the "década de la apertura," the period of a Spanish booming economic development fueled by the first and then die second PUn de Desarrollo . For Catalonia these were also years of extensive economic growth, massive immigration , intense political activity, and the re-emergence of the vibrant nationalist culture harshly repressed by Francoism. While goals and ideologies could be, and in fact were, vastly different, in Catalonia the anti-Francoist political activity of the time can be grouped around two main areas: one revolving around different propositions of Marxist denomination that tended to the proletariat, and another of an explicitly nationalist bent that belonged mosdy to the lower-middle, middle and professional classes of the native urban population. The latter manifested itself as a strong, re-emergent Catalan nationalist sentiment wrapped in a traditional nineteenth-century romantic ideology of essentialist roots. Pointing to the historical victimization of the Catalan culture, the Catalan nationalists of the '60s pushed forward a civic nationalism that strongly aimed to achieve Catalan hegemony and linguistic visibility through an identity-based political and cultural agenda. The nationalist projects of the 1960s, however, (and in spite of the social interactions...