Running for a fight - MALLORCA AND LANGUAGE POLICY
Over the years, the Joves de Mallorca association has been involved with campaigns to get product labelling in Catalan, making Catalan a recognised language by the EU, promoting cinema in Catalan, and establishing Catalan as a standard language for admini
THIS Friday, April 5, there is a music event in Manacor featuring acts like Maria Hein. From Felanitx, she is a rising star of Mallorca's pop scene and is therefore a big attraction for an event that celebrates a thirtieth anniversary. This is for a non-profit youth association called Joves de Mallorca per la Llengua.
Young people have been defending the language since 1994, the language being Catalan. This association, founded on July 1 of that year by Tomeu Martí and Pere Muñoz, has its offices in Can Alcover in Palma. A cultural centre that takes its name from Mallorcan author Joan Alcover, whose poem was adapted to provide the lyrics to Mallorca's hymn, ‘La Balanguera', this is also the headquarters of the Obra Cultural Balear (OCB), the organisation which was established at a time, 1962, when defence of Catalan was hardly, shall we say, encouraged by the Franco regime.
Over the years, the Joves de Mallorca association has been involved with campaigns to get product labelling in Catalan, making Catalan a recognised language by the EU, promoting cinema in Catalan, and establishing Catalan as a standard language for administrations. It is making a big thing of the 30th anniversary, another celebration of which will be the ‘Correlengua' between May 1 and 5. As well as various events, this running of language consists of a relay to carry ‘the flame of language'. “Five nonstop days covering more than 1,000 kilometres,” says the association, which for the first time is organising stages of the Correlengua on all the islands and not just Mallorca.
Joves de Mallorca is said to have been revitalised by a new board and by the return of “mass activism” in favour of Catalan in Mallorca. And the flame of language activism has been kindled by Mallorca's politics, most clearly the arrival of Vox in seats of power, either directly or, as with the Balearic government, in a support role to the Partido Popular.
The OCB, which might reasonably be perceived as a mentoring organisation for
Joves de Mallorca, held a meeting with President Marga Prohens last week. Every picture tells a story, the OCB having been the ones to supply it to the media. Four representatives were arranged on sofas with the president. She was smiling, beaming even. They weren't. There were grim faces.
The meeting was to do with language policy for education, something which can seem to have been the most obvious mani
festation of the language political football over the years but has in fact been characterised by relatively calm waters, except when politicians really choose to stir them up. Despite his protestations to the contrary, the last PP president, José Ramón Bauzá, chose confrontation over Catalan, and boy did he get it.
The current PP have not sought trouble, but the fact that it is brewing is due to their having been backed into a corner by Vox. Government and parliamentary support comes at a price, and the ounce of flesh demanded has been labelled language in schools. But not only schools. At Palma town hall, which is like the government in that Vox support the PP as opposed to being represented in the ruling administration, the OCB said a few days ago that forty years of linguistic consensus had been broken.
The OCB are considering legal action. “No attack on the Catalan language will go unanswered.” This attack comes in the form of eliminating Catalan as a requirement for town hall functioning and demotes it to a merit. The leader of Vox in Palma, Fulgencio Coll, said that Catalan would only be mandatory for public-facing functions, such as citizen attention offices, although there may be more - the town hall has until July 1 to define jobs for which there is a requirement.
This change, Coll stated, was a measure included in the post-election agreement between the PP and Vox (however much the PP might not actually have wanted it). Addressing the council chamber, he said: “Catalan has been used to promote a certain ideology to staff. We want to end linguistic apartheid and an attack on the official language of the state (Castellano). Spain is the only country in the world where it is prohibited to use the official language of the state. No one is attacking Catalan. We are defending the right to speak Spanish.”
Among responses from the opposition came observations by Miquel Àngel Contreras of Més: “Hatred and phobia towards the language that our mothers, our grandparents and so many generations have taught us.” He gave a warning that the strength of feeling will be demonstrated. When? On May 5 in Palma's Plaça Major, where the Correlengua will conclude and the OCB have promised a protest in defence of Catalan.
On the fifth of May, the mass activism that has revitalised Joves de Mallorca will be on display, the consequence of a breakdown of the apparent consensus that has existed for decades (save for a time when Bauzá was president) and to which the PP are now reluctant but necessary contributors. The OCB have highlighted this breakdown, as have Més, as also have PSOE, whose councillor Silvana González told the Palma council meeting: “The mayor of Palma, Jaime Martínez, has renounced all linguistic wealth. He is succumbing to the obsessions of his administration partners by breaking consensus.”
In the education field, where the OCB are also considering legal action, the PP education minister, Antoni Vera, has been handed the task of navigating his way around a political minefield of having to keep Vox onside while at the same time not wishing to appear confrontational. The essence of the issue in schools that has arisen from the PP-Vox agreement is the so-called free choice of teaching language (Castellano or Catalan). Vera now says that this will not be applied if school managements don't propose it. He has stressed the voluntary nature of this choice, insisting that it is aimed at schools and not at parents. It is not therefore a parental right.
If so, which is unlikely to satisfy Vox, what is the fuss? This is because there is to be a pilot project, and the very idea of a pilot for this free choice is, says the Coapa confederation of parents associations, a “pedagogical aberration”. “It makes no sense.” These remarks were made at a meeting of the education sector's roundtable by the Coapa president, Cristina Conti. Sixty million euros that have been budgeted for the language plan (which would clearly necessitate greater
teaching and infrastructure resources) should be better spent on other school requirements and on the pupils.
She has ruled out protests for the time being, but there is a sense that others are already angling for a fight. Vera, damned if he does, damned if he doesn't, faces issues with the unions, and a body that became familiar because of the protests against Bauzá's language policy, the Assemblea de Docents (Teachers' Assembly), has reemerged after more than eight years. Its members have gone back to wearing the green t-shirts that were so visible at the huge protest that was staged in Palma on September 29, 2013.
At a gathering of the revived assembly in Inca in early February, a spokesperson, Marina Vergés, referred to a “frontal attack” on Catalan. “It is ideological, not pedagogical.” The government's plan, Vergés argues, implies linguistic separation. Another interpretation is linguistic apartheid, which Fulgencio Coll - from a totally different political perspective - wishes to end. Coll denounces ideology, and opponents volley this back in returning the ideological denunciation.
Whether Palma town hall or Mallorca's schools, the principles of this renewed confrontation are the same. It can perhaps seem that the arguments about language are ones cultivated by politicians for their political purposes and are divorced from an everyday society which would prefer to just get on with using whatever language it is that suits them, including Mallorquí. But they clearly aren't so divorced. If they were, why is there an association like Joves de Mallorca? Ah, but is this an association that is the product of ideology? Perhaps, but is it not also a product of the desire for cultural identity?
Yes, but then Fulgencio Coll would argue that there is more than one identity.