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Spain The Catalans
The four Spanish provinces in the northeast corner of
the
Iberian Peninsula constitute the principal homeland of the
Catalans. The Catalan autonomous community covers about
6.5
percent of Spain's total peninsular land area. The region
consists of the provinces of Barcelona, Gerona, Lerida,
and
Tarragona. Elsewhere in Spain, there were also significant
Catalan-speaking populations in the Balearic Islands,
along the
east coast to the south of Valencia, and as far west as
the
eastern part of the Aragonese province of Huesca. Outside
Spain,
the principal Catalan populations were found in France, at
the
eastern end of the Pyrenees, and in Andorra.
The population of the Catalan region in 1986 was
approximately 6.0 million, of which 4.6 million lived in
densely
populated Barcelona province. The other three provinces
were more
sparsely populated. As one of the richest areas of Spain
and the
first to industrialize, Catalonia attracted hundreds of
thousands
of migrants, primarily from Andalusia and other poor parts
of the
country. From 1900 to 1981, the net in-migration into
Catalonia
was about 2.4 million. In the 1980s, over half of
Catalonia's
working class, and the vast majority of its unskilled or
semi-skilled workers, were cultural outsiders.
Catalan was one of five distinct Romance languages that
emerged as the Islamic invasion of the Iberian Peninsula
began to
ebb
(see Al Andalus
, ch. 1). The others were Aragonese,
Castilian, Leonese, and Galician. By the late Middle Ages,
the
kingdoms of Catalonia, Aragon, and Valencia had joined
together
in a federation, forging one of the most advanced
constitutional
systems of the time in Europe
(see Castile and Aragon
, ch.
1).
After the union of the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile
in
1479, the Spanish crown maintained a loose administrative
hold
over its component realms. Although it occasionally tried
to
assert more centralized control, in the case of Catalonia
its
efforts generally resulted in failure. Nonetheless,
attempts by
Catalans in the seventeenth century to declare their
independence
were likewise unsuccessful
(see Spain in Decline
, ch. 1).
In the
War of the Spanish Succession, Catalonia sided with the
English
against the Spanish crown, and the signing of the Treaty
of
Utrecht in 1713 opened the way for the conquest of
Catalonia by
Spanish troops
(see War of the Spanish Succession
, ch. 1).
In
September 1714, after a long siege, Barcelona fell, and
Catalonia's formal constitutional independence came to an
end.
During the latter half of the nineteenth century,
Catalonia
experienced a dramatic resurgence as the focal point of
Spain's
industrial revolution
(see
The Cuban Disaster and the "Generation of 1898", ch. 1).
There were also a cultural renaissance
and a
renewed emphasis on the Catalan language as the key to
Catalan
cultural distinctiveness. Catalan nationalism was put
forward by
the nascent Catalan bourgeoisie as a solution that coupled
political and cultural autonomy with economic integration
in the
Spanish market. For a brief period during the 1930s, the
freedom
of the Second Republic gave the Catalans a taste of
political
autonomy, but the door was shut for forty years by the
Franco
dictatorship
(see Republican Spain
, ch. 1).
There were, in principle, several different criteria
that
were used to determine who was, or was not, Catalan. One's
place
of birth, or the place of birth of one's parents, was
often used
by second-generation migrants to claim Catalan status, but
relatively few whose families had been Catalan for
generations
agreed with these claims. Biological descent was seldom
used
among either natives or migrants, because Catalans, unlike
Basques, did not usually define their ethnic identity in
such
terms. Sentimental allegiance to Catalonia was important
in
separating out from the category those native Catalans who
no
longer felt any identification with their homeland, but
preferred
to identify themselves as Spanish. Thus, the most
significant and
powerful indicator of Catalan identity, for both Catalans
and
migrants alike, was the ability to speak the Catalan
language.
According to one estimate, the population (including
those
outside Spain) speaking Catalan or one of its variants
(Valencian
or Majorcan) numbered about 6.5 million in the late 1980s.
Within
the Catalan autonomous community, about 50 percent of the
people
spoke Catalan as a mother tongue, and another 30 percent
could at
least understand the language. In Valencia and the
Balearic
Islands, perhaps as many as 50 to 70 percent of the
population
spoke one of the variants of Catalan as a mother tongue,
although
a great majority used the language only in the home.
Data as of December 1988
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