This past couple of weeks have been particularly hurtful. While we were all paying attention to world leaders' cruel and greedy wars, most people have not realised what was happening here at home:
1. The government coalition formed by Spanish nationalist parties PP (right wing) and Vox (fascist party) are declaring parts of the traditionally Valencian-speaking Valencian Country as "Spanish speaking areas".
(Note: "Valencian" and "Catalan" are two names for the same language. Depending on the area, one name or the other is more commonly used.)
In the areas officially recognised as Valencian speaking territory, the law recognises certain language rights for the autochthonous language (even though that even there the rights aren't always respected and Spanish is still imposed in many circumstances).
To complete the imposition of Spanish over the local language, the Spanish nationalist parties PP and Vox are passing resolutions and laws to make some areas that have historically been Valencian-speaking and where many people still speak it to be classified as areas that are historical Spanish areas. As an excuse, they use the fact that the majority of the population in these areas use Spanish more than Valencian, as a result of the historical persecution and discrimination against Valencian.
Reclassifying these areas as Spanish-speaker areas strips the Valencian speaker population from its rights, imposing the occupiers' language. It also strips people who don't speak Valencian (such as immigrants and the children of families who chose to change language as a result of discrimination and pressure) from the opportunities to learn it and connect with their homeland's culture, history, and identity. Instead, they will only be able to connect to the Spanish ones.
The city of Alacant —the southern capital city of the Valencian Country— has just been declared as Spanish-speaker area, despite the truth of being a historical Valencian speaking area.
And again, despite the demonstrations against it, the City Council of Vinaròs (PP, Vox, and PVI) has already passed the resolution to "generalize Spanish", which means that the street name signs, official communications, and official documents will be done in Spanish.
Erasing the cultural-linguistic community that has built these towns also means that they change the name of the town to Spanish. Some cities are also working in this direction, to officially change the name to the Spanish translation or Spanish spelling instead of the correct Valencian spelling. The far right wing politicians in the capital city, València, have been fighting to erase the ` for this reason for a long time, but they're not the only ones.
They are trying to do this in more areas, so Valencians please keep a close watch in your city councils.
2. "Spanishizing" school
Many laws are being passed when it comes to the public school system to impose Spanish instead of the local language Catalan.
School has always been one of the main tools used by imperial states to impose the imperial language (Spanish in this case). Making kids associate the imperial language with the situations of prestige, learning to write and speak the imperial language correctly but not their own (being unable to spell their own language as a result), meeting your friends and peers in an environment where the language you speak is the imperial one (and, as a result, creating your friendships and speaking with them in the imperial language instead of your own) are ways to marginalize the local language and make it disappear from the public sphere. Nowadays, we are a country with a high amount of immigrant population, so it's also important that they can access education in the local language so they can become part of the local community and not be outsiders forever.
Some years ago, the minister of education of the Spanish government Wert (PP party) summed it up perfectly speaking in a Congress session: "[with schools] our interest is to turn Catalan kids into Spanish kids" ("Nuestro interés es españolizar a los niños catalanes").
Multiple laws and resolutions for this purpose have been passed: the Justice Court has taken down the law in Catalonia that guaranteed education to take place in Catalan (though in practise some teachers refuse) and a law in the Valencian Country that excludes authors from Catalonia and the Balearic Islands from being part of the literature curriculum (read here how to present allegations against it online) are just the two latest ones to the list.
3. Spanish state workers continue banning Catalan people from having Catalan names or Catalan spelling of their names.
For most of the 20th century, Spain and France made it illegal for Catalan people to have their names officially written in the Catalan language (the same applied to other national minorities like Basques, Galicians, Occitans, Bretons, etc). Instead, in the Spanish-controlled part of the Catalan Countries it was mandatory to have names in Spanish, while in the French-controlled part of Catalonia it was mandatory to have names following French spelling.
Denying people the right to have their names in their language is a way of forbidding part of our identity, denying who we are, and forcing on us the identity of our oppressor.
Nowadays, the Government of Spain allows names in other languages, while France has just (in March 2026!) started the first steps towards allowing the spelling of what they call "regional" languages. France made this resolution purely for economical reasons, because Catalan, Basque, and Breton people were going to the courts to fight for the right to name their children in their language, which they didn't succeed in but they made the state lose money in. However, this resolution that would allow our names is very weak and many expect that it won't pass the tribunals. We'll have to see how long it lasts, but meanwhile some people have already quickly started the procedures to have their real name spelled correctly on their official documents.
Now back to the Spanish-occupied part of our country. Even though here the law has recognised that we have the right to be named in our language since the 1980s, in practice this depends on the Spanish state worker we run into when doing the administrative procedure.
It has happened to many of us. When my parents inscribed me as a baby, they also had to defend that my name should be allowed (I have a traditional Catalan name). My father had to prove it is a place with a cathedral, so even if it wasn't already Catalan name it still should be accepted as a Catholic place name (we shouldn't have to prove anything by Spanish Catholic standards though!). Still, the state worker didn't accept it. My father is extremely insistent, he got the state worker to call her superior and ask. The state worker called and said "here there is a man who wants to name his daughter [letter by letter, instead of pronouncing my name]" as if it was such a weird word. It's not an unheard of name, but anyway 🤦. Luckily, the superior said there is no reason not to accept it. Others haven't been as lucky.
Every year, multiple Catalan people denounce that the Spanish administration hasn't allowed them to name their children in Catalan. And we all know that most families don't denounce it, they end up accepting that they'll informally call their child one name but all the official things (school, ID, etc) will have to have another name. So the numbers can be higher. The ones we hear about are the ones who go to court to defend their children's name.
This week, it has been a newborn with the surname Garcia (a surname of Basque origin that has existed for centuries in many Iberian languages, including Galician-Portuguese, Spanish, Basque, Aragonese, and Catalan, each of them spelled in their own language). When they went to inscribe their newborn child to the registry, the state worker forbid the family to use the correct Catalan spelling (Garcia), which is the father's surname and is written like this in his ID document. Instead, the state worker said they would only accept the Spanish spelling (García). Catalan "Garcia" and Spanish "García" are also pronounced differently (the vowels sound different and the "c" in Catalan is like an "s" while in Spanish is like a "th"), so writing the name like that means that every time someone read his name from a list they will mispronounce it like it's in Spanish.
When they asked to speak to someone else, all the other state workers agreed that the Catalan spelling is illegal, saying that it goes against the rules of the Royal Spanish Academy. The parents turned in a complaint to the relevant authorities (the registry authority of the Government of Spain's Ministry of Justice), but this government branch has still answered that the surname's Catalan spelling is illegal. Which is not actually true according to the law!
The stupidest part about all of these situations is that there are already hundreds of people with these "forbidden" names and surnames! For example, the newborn's dad has this spelling in his ID, passport, marriage certificate, etc. In fact, in Catalonia there's even a town called Garcia (with the Catalan spelling!) and thousands of people are officially named Garcia. Claiming that only the Spanish spelling is correct is an act of institutionalized Spanish supremacy.
4. In Northern Catalonia's capital city —Perpinyà—, the new City Council has eliminated all their work references to Catalan affairs.
The recent municipal elections in Northern Catalonia (French-controlled part of Catalonia) have had terrible results, with some towns falling into the hands of the far right wing. One of them is the capital city Perpinyà, where one of the first changes made by the new City Council has been to eliminate the City Council's Catalan Affairs secretariat (Regidoria de Catalanitat) and eliminate the words related to Catalan affairs from the list of responsibilities in the council's positions.
And more! It seems like every day we get new situations like these, without time to stop them all. Also other laws attacking the traditional understandings in our society, such as the new law from the València City Councils that forbids farmers of the orchards outside València city to sell their products in the city's marketplaces. Instead, the new law will force farmers to sell their products to middle-men first, which in practise means less wages for farmers (farmers are already one of the poorest demographics in our country) and less locally-grown product. Farmers have had this right recognized by Valencian law since the Middle Ages! They've been doing this for 800 years! And yet in a time of climate crisis, where we should be relying on locally-grown food and not polluting emissions to bring food grown in exploited third world countries, the laws move in the opposite direction.
To end on a funny note...
But at least we have something to laugh about. Yesterday morning, the police went to arrest the Catalan comedian Jair Domínguez (he was sued by the Spanish fascist party Vox because he had said on the radio "the way to combat fascists and nazis is with a punch in the jaw", which Vox says is hate speech). Catalan comedians (or rap singers, or clowns, or NGO members, or other activists, or democratically-electes politicians, or students, or random people) getting sued by Spanish supremacists because of stupid reasons is nothing new, and getting arrested when there's no reason to presume they'd escape nor any reason to arrest them is not new either. The funny thing is that the cops went to the wrong house, they showed up to his ex-wife's looking for him. Then they went to find him in a different house, and failed again because he moved 😅 Jair Domínguez posted this on social media and told the cops "if you send me a DM, I'll tell you where I am". He had already posted from his house yesterday, where he was setting up a new sofa.
At least we can always count on the police's incompetence...
