The African-American writer James Baldwin ironized the final verses of the American anthem in a framework of patent racism: “Today, looking around the United States is enough to make prophets and angels cry. This is not the land of the free; It is only, reluctantly and sporadically, the home of the brave.” It is advisable to read Baldwin from a Castilian distance when contemplating the Catalan elections because, if, as Enric Juliana maintains, Catalonia predicts and rehearses Spanish politics, the elections we are heading to will not clear up the doubt of whether independence or progressivism are hegemonic. but they will express – unless the polls are very wrong – the success of xenophobia in Catalan society.
While almost all the candidates – except Comuns Sumar and the CUP – are committed to accelerating the extractive model based on tourism, the parties that are experiencing the most growth in the surveys agree on placing “the problem” of immigration at the center of their agendas , from positions that range from the only suggested anti-immigrant discourse to the most blatant racism. Seen from half a thousand kilometers, Catalonia today does not decide between the left and independence, but between flip-flops and sandals, between tourists and those who serve them. And the bet seems to lean shamelessly towards the former.
It is not something that we do not know in this Madrid that lays out red carpets in the Salamanca neighborhood for Caracas capital and vulture funds, and that offers support to the immigrants from Lavapiés. But we know it as praxis, not as campaign debates. Nobody verbalizes it, we still do not militate in that audacity. In the Catalan elections they talk about it shamelessly, sometimes with rude sincerity. If the results are what the polls announce, we will conclude that Xavier García Albiol, popular mayor of Badalona, ??was a pioneer, promising ten years ago to “clean up the city.”
Flip-flops are clearly winning – expanding airports, highways, docks and housing provision, as well as the supply to abound in the extractive economy – over sandals, needy people who bother in the streets, although it always comes in handy when you have to hire at a bargain price. The paradox is monstrous because the economy of flip-flops demands sandals. If it were possible to do without these, betting on productive economic models, flip-flops would have to be limited, but that has not been heard in the debates.
Progressivism and independenceism – nothing to do with processism, because that is an objective and this is only a method – retreat in the face of footwear racism. And that is what Catalonia emits today to a country that is no longer paying attention. We will have to take note in case this is the canary in our troubled mine. You have to find out if there is firedamp.
