Word: catalane
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Central to this sense of cultural and political uniqueness is the Catalan language. As Hughes observes, "In Catalunya, language and politics are entwined , interwoven, inseparable." During the dictatorship of Franco, in fact, one way of stamping out any leftover feelings of rebellion was to ban the public use of Catalan. When writers could not be published in Catalan, they used it as a gesture of political defiance...
...beginnings of Barcelona's feisty sense of autonomy lie embedded deeply within its lexical past. Contrary to popular belief, Catalan is not a bastardized version of Castilian, but a proper language in its own right. When the Romans conquered the Iberian peninsula, as Hughes tells us, they brought with them, two kinds of Latin from two distinct socio-economic classes. While the Roman elite went south to the silver mines (and hence, the money), the Roman farmers and laborers settled in the fertile northern regions, bringing their more modern, "slangy" Latin with them...
...from these humble origins that the city first arose. While the rest of Spain speaks Castilian, Barcelona and Catalunya claim Catalan as their own; its existence as a language apart bolsters the region's own sense of political and cultural identity. The cultivation of the land by the region's first farmers also aided this nation-building process. Even today, as Hughes readily informs us Barcelona is "more a city of capital and labor than of nobility and commerce," and "its democratic roots are old and run very deep...
Barcelona's glory really began in the ninth century, with Guifre el Pelos (literally, Wilfred the Hairy--his famed hairiness has since passed into legend) leading the way to independence against the invading Moors. As the first genuine national (read: Catalan) hero, he began a noble line of political--and hairy--agitators...
...from the most basis elements of the city--its buildings--arrives in the sensual pleasure of the writing. He takes on the architecture of the Eixample (the enlargement of the city which occurred in the ninteenth century--like Domenech and Gaudi--are never separated from the cultural context of Catalan modernisme and the anarchists' movements...