"Thank you very much for showing interest in women's football.". CE Manacor recently appointed a new women's football coordinator. Due to my work as an intrepid reporter, I became interested in this new position within the club's infrastructure. Alicia, the new coordinator, received our message and contacted us. In Spanish. I returned her reply, via WhatsApp, in Catalan. And all with spelling mistakes, and we agreed on a telephone interview. Hearing her voice and looking at her lineage, I asked her: "Weren't you a student of mine?" "Are you a Toni?" Spanish speaker. She was a student of ours, a good handful of years ago, at the IES Portocristo. I thought... "Whew, Toni, how are you going to do around here?" the waiter attacked me. Shorts, white shirt, trousers with pleats in dress and manner, in service and speech.
And this very week, also on journalistic duties, in the magazine One Hundred Percent We've spoken with various witnesses to the protests taking place in Morocco these days. They're local girls. Their parents came from the Maghreb. And they all speak Catalan, a wonderful language. One, Chaimaa, is from Manacor, and the other two are from Portocristo: Asmaa and Fatima. Three girls who are conscious of their Mallorcan identity and, at the same time, proud of their roots. They assert their origins while analyzing their place within the society where they were born and which so often only looks at them out of the corner of their eye, as if it doesn't want to truly feel they belong to them. They think, reflect, discuss, and speak from a stirring awareness. Asmaa, Fatima, and Chaimaa were our students at the IES Portocristo, from which they recently left.
The IES Portocristo is a coastal school, with all the implications that this entails. Fellow teachers from Son Servera, Arenal, Calvià, Puerto de Alcudia, or Puerto de Pollença will understand. Each one, of course, has different circumstances, but the basic facts are the same: many recently arrived families, many others who have already settled here and have had their children, but are still in the process of adapting to the place that welcomed them and finding their way in the workplace and economically. The social, economic, familial, and emotional needs of these children are enormous, beyond the resources available to the teachers who are supposed to care for them. The Catalan language in the classroom is spoken by the teachers (and not all of them). The majority of students, even those who are native Catalan speakers, always speak in Spanish during recess. Teachers who are sensitive to language issues live a very difficult, hopeless, and frustrating day-to-day life. It feels like you're drawing lines in the water.
But be careful. There is a learning process that cannot be seen, that we cannot experience firsthand, because it is slow and hardens over time, and that watches over the eyes of the students when they have left the nest of our school. On the one hand, linguistic competence, acquired after years of chipping away, of being there and not letting go. Without perseverance, loyalty, and a deep belief in the meaning of what we do, this achievement would not be possible. On the other, linguistic attitude, the assumption that Mallorca has its own language, that it is useful, that it is necessary, and without which this land and its people would be different.
Pep Barrull, the first principal of IES Portocristo, said that over the years he reunited with former students of the school for whom, at the time, he wouldn't have given a penny. However, in the end, everyone ended up finding their place in the world: a cook, a hairdresser, an engineer, a cashier, a bank employee, a gas station attendant, a man from the outskirts of the city, a painter, a schoolteacher, and a construction foreman.
Everyone, too, eventually finds their linguistic place in the world and in the place where they live. This very week, President Margalida Prohens published a piece of Hispanic pride (about sharing ties and bonds and all that empty rhetoric). Beyond the fact itself, which each person will evaluate according to their sense of belonging, it was striking, precisely, that in order to claim this Hispanic identity, the president from the Campanera had to do so in the language of the people of Valladolid. One more example of what is possible, not even for those who claim it, to be Spanish while speaking a language other than that of Cervantes.
Meanwhile, despite the president, despite the councilors and so many people who allegedly have mention of our institutions practicing shamelessly linguistic policies, Alicia, Dani, Asmaa, Fatima, Chaimaa and thousands of young people like them are the names of our hope.
