In Barcelona I Found Love for My Mother Tongue
This essay comes from my latest book, The Invisible Philippine War and Other Essays: Attempts at Making Sense of This Filipino Life
Every August, schools all over the Philippines celebrate Buwan ng Wika, the national month of language. Banderitas fill corridors, evoking fiestas of rural Philippines. The usual troop of academic competitors turns their focus on declamation and poetry contests. The celebration culminates with a feast of Filipino cuisine — lechon, puto, bibinka, atbp.
Later in life, beyond the rituals of the education system, only TV entertainers, with their ironic dialogues in formal Tagalog, remind us of Buwan ng Wika. For most Filipinos, the month passes just like any other.
But for me, and I imagine for many of us who grew up in Cebu, the month of the national language recalls a tension of identity and belonging.
Beneath the school’s official script of nationalism flowed a hidden current of defiance. In my youth, it appeared as irreverent linguistic jokes. The worst I could recall is a typical Bisaya spoof of the national anthem involving an old lady and a disabled doctor (don’t ask: it absolutely makes no sense).
The grown-ups took it more seriously. Every August, Cebuano columnists would write about a few inevitable topics: Imperial Manila, federalism, and the Cebuano language.
This tug-of-war was my education in Philippine identity politics — official nationalism on one side, loyalty to my mother tongue on the other. I’m not surprised that many chose the conyo option — that half-assed escape from one’s linguistic heritage. After all, what is the use of these local languages in this globalized world of business, technology, and boundless opportunity?
Like many travelers, distance and comparison gave me perspective. My short stay in Barcelona allowed me to unpack these competing loyalties and my own insecurities.
Barcelona and Cebu tread strikingly similar paths in history. For instance, the people of Barcelona have been speaking Catalan — their mother tongue — for centuries. But when the boundaries of nation-states were drawn, they ended up belonging to one with a different national language, Spanish, which they insist on calling Castellano.
Barcelona had it much worse than Cebu. For several decades in the last century, Catalan was prohibited in all public offices and schools. Parents were even forbidden from naming their children with Catalan names like Joan, Jaume, or Jordi — names had to be “authentic” Spanish ones like Juan, Jaime, or Jorge.
The worst that Cebuanos could complain of is that singing the national anthem in Cebuano is against the law (which is nevertheless openly disregarded), or that most Cebuanos never get taught their mother tongue in school. And if you name your kid “Lapu-Lapu Gandhi Beckham M. Apelido,” you won’t be jailed, although you should be.
Yet, Catalan is now thriving. There are almost 6,000 books published in the Catalan language every year, around 12% of the total published in Spain. Ads in Barcelona use Catalan. Catalan is taught and is used for instruction up to the university level in Barcelona schools. And today, there are probably as many Jordis in Barcelona as there are Niños in Cebu.
How did Catalan go from being banned by the government to its current state of vigor? And what can Cebu learn from this experience? If you are looking for a scholarly answer, there’s a book by a certain Daniele Conversi entitled The Basques, the Catalans, and Spain.1 It traces the roots of the successes and failures of the two strongest non-Castillan language groups in Spain, the Basques and the Catalans.
However, if you simply walk the streets of Barcelona, visit its museums, and talk to its people, you can plainly see the answers. One factor must be the success of homegrown Catalan businesses. Another is clearly their strong sense of identity, shown in their support for their artists and their language. The third is less tangible but something that you could see in both Barcelona and Cebu — a certain openness or outwardness in their collective mindsets.
Barcelona families are probably the most entrepreneurial in Spain. Being a coastal city, Barcelona has always been a center of commerce. Apparently, they also have a reputation for stinginess, which only increased my endearment for the city. One day, I was toured by some guys from the residence hall I was staying in. One of them, Ignasi, was Catalan. As we were walking, we saw a tiny coin on the pavement. The three non-Catalans told Ignasi, in that affectionately insulting manner one has with close friends, to drop to his knees and scramble for the coin, “because,” they told him, “you are Catalan.”
Perhaps this stinginess just shows that Catalans know where to put their money. Support for artists is very tangible in Barcelona; you see it all over the city. Gaudí, Dalí, Picasso — they are honored in Barcelona the way Rizal is honored in the Philippines. Each of them had patrons — private wealth and popular following — which enabled them to pursue their artistic visions.
My favorite example is Antoni Gaudí’s La Sagrada Familia, which unfailingly appears in Barcelona’s tourist brochures the way the Magellan’s Cross appears in Cebu’s. It’s fascinating. While Gothic spires express the medieval sense of the glory and order of a universe ordained toward God, La Sagrada Familia — which grows, swirls, and bubbles upward like a concrete forest of living, breathing organisms — seems to celebrate and emulate God’s own artistry and architecture as seen in nature.
The construction of La Sagrada Familia started in 1882. Gaudí died in 1926, leaving the church unfinished. The construction continues, and 2026 is its target completion date, a hundred years after the death of its architect. La Sagrada Familia is a Catalan artist’s expression of faith. What made that expression possible, long after the death of the artist, has been the patronage of the people of Barcelona and beyond.
La Sagrada Familia answered my questions about the usefulness of Cebuano in this globalized world. Or, more accurately, it questioned my questions. Questioning the usefulness of my mother tongue is like questioning the usefulness of La Sagrada Familia. Some things ought to exist because they are useful; others simply because they are beautiful.
La Sagrada Familia is just one example of the symbiosis of business, art, and the expression and growth of a people’s culture. Like La Sagrada Familia, the Catalan language also flourished in the material and cultural wealth of Barcelona. In an essay entitled “Resplendent Catalan: What Money Can Buy?,” linguist Anthony Pym writes: “So is Catalan really a model for other stateless languages? More exactly, can contemporary language revival be achieved by money alone, or even money plus sharp political skill? The answer must clearly depend on very specific combinations of factors.”2
This is why I find the Barcelona experience so interesting. If there is another city that fulfills the “very specific combination of factors” that Pym requires, it is Cebu. Even the cultural shortchanging experienced by both cities had identical strategies. According to Conversi, “While the attempts to crush Euskara were openly aimed at its eradication, the anti-Catalan polity included a supplementary strategy of ‘dialectisation’: that is, the authorities tried to promote the view that Catalan was a mere dialect, a sub-variety of Spanish.” Sounds familiar?
More than similar challenges, it is shared mindsets that make Barcelona a model for Cebu. Resil Mojares, in the book Cebu: More Than an Island, observes that being a “narrow, elongated island of coastal settlements, Cebu is turned outwards, more oriented to the sea and places beyond it than to mountains and the hinterland.”3 The same could be said for the coastal city of Barcelona. Also, Conversi says that “Catalans had a ‘bourgeois’ ethos tied to small family enterprises,” while Mojares notes that Cebu has a “merchantman culture.”
This openness, I think, is what prevents contempt for other languages and for outsiders, contempt that stems from toxic nationalism. James Michener has a book entitled Iberia. It’s a bit dated, but it still gives a good introduction to the varied cultures of Spain. In the chapter on Barcelona, he relates a conversation with Dr. Poal, a Catalan.4 Michener asks about separatism. The doctor answers: “We must integrate fully with Spain, and everyone I know is eager to do so. But I would lie if I did not say that I feel more Catalan than anyone else in this room or perhaps in all Barcelona. My heart throbs to the rhythm of this land. […] But politically our future rests in being a creative part of Spain. God, how the rest of Spain needs us!” He explains the roots of their openness: “Because we are so mixed in our heritage we are not narrow-minded little provincials. We have a bigness of spirit . . . a singing of the heart.”
It has been years since that trip. Yet it continues to haunt me. Especially in August. Barcelona’s love for Catalan art and language showed me what the Cebuano language could be. And its mindset of openness, which is likewise part of my Cebuano heritage, freed me from my complexities with other languages.
I realized that I had conflicting loyalties because I was thinking like a politician. When one politician supports his language, other politicians see it as a threat to theirs. In the world of politics, there can only be one winner, and language is just one of the many weapons to gain power, a weapon to be used or discarded as convenient.
In the world of art, the beauty of language is an end in itself. When a Cebuano poet speaks of the beauty of the Cebuano language, the Tagalog poet understands perfectly. Because she feels the same for her mother tongue.
This essay comes from my latest book, The Invisible Philippine War and Other Essays: Attempts at Making Sense of This Filipino Life
Daniele Conversi, The Basques, the Catalans, and Spain: Alternative Routes to Nationalist Mobilisation (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1997).
Anthony Pym, "Resplendent Catalan: What Money Can Buy?," in Discourse and Silencing: Representation and the Language of Displacement, ed. Lynn Thiesmeyer (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 2003), 199-212.
Resil B. Mojares, Cebu: More Than an Island (Cebu City: Ayala Foundation, 1997)
James A. Michener, Iberia: Spanish Travels and Reflections (New York: Random House, 1968)