The Walking Mouth Defending Barcelona
An odd Catalan campaign might be keeping a language alive
Joan Miró. Gerard Piqué. Rosalía. These are internationally renowned artists, athletes, and musicians, instantly recognizable anywhere in the world, and they’re all from the northeastern Spanish region of Catalonia. They’re symbols of Barcelona’s immense past and present cultural cache.
But there’s another Catalan celebrity who outshines them all. He’s impossible to miss on metro posters, billboards, and television commercials throughout Barcelona; Catalans know of no bigger star. He’s a tough fellow to reach, a real man of mystery, but over the summer a contact of a friend put me in touch, and I was lucky enough to meet the guy face to face. I even convinced him to take a photo together:
Meet La Queta. La Queta—short for boqueta, or “little mouth” in Catalan—is a scaled-up set of teeth replete with stick arms and legs jutting out of his jaw. He’s got googly eyes resting above the roof of his mouth. You see him once, and he’s impossible to forget. In Barcelona, he’s everywhere.
La Queta is the product of a regional government campaign launched in 2005 aimed at encouraging locals to do something mundane: speak. Not in any old way, though: in Catalan, the official language of the region. Provem-ho en Català, the sign behind the life-sized Queta reads; “Let’s try it in Catalan.”1 I only came across one real-life Queta, but 2-D ads like these, all featuring similar messages, dominate Barcelona.
Then there are the television commercials. As you might expect, they’re glorious.
With a theme song:
The latest spot, from this year (“Lots to talk about, lots to live for”):
Why, you ask, has the Catalan government been pumping out La Queta content like this for nearly two decades now?
For the millennium and a half since the fall of Western Rome, Catalonia has developed a cultural and linguistic history distinct from the rest of the Iberian peninsula, operating with varying levels of political independence along the way. Today, Catalonia operates as an autonomous community within Spain; while tied to the Spanish government politically, the region’s culture is unique. This is abundantly evident upon visiting today; in major Catalan cities, there’s little sign of any official national Spanish presence.
The Spanish language, which nearly every Catalan resident speaks fluently, is included on some signage and most menus in tourist-heavy areas in Barcelona, but otherwise Catalan dominates life in the region, and any Spanish speaker who’s tried reading or understanding Catalan knows it’s a common mistake (one I’d highly recommend not making in front of a blood-sworn Catalan independentista) to call it a Spanish dialect. It’s at least as distinct from Spanish as Portuguese is.
Catalans take great pride in their language itself, but the true significance of La Queta is borne out of the close relationship between Catalan and region’s fraught political history.
La Queta’s birth has everything to do with the last hundred years of that history. The fate of 20th century Catalonia was largely dictated by the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War, which pitted an incumbent republican Spanish government (one favoring a federalist-style Spanish coalition on a path towards granting Catalonia near-complete independence) against the pro-nationalist insurgent forces of military general Francisco Franco. Half a million died amidst the fighting (including 200,000 in “systematic killings, mob violence, torture, or other brutalities”), and the violence throughout Spain, but particularly in Catalonia, only continued under Franco’s dictatorship:
Upon seizing full control of Spain, in 1939, Franco imposed a policy of limpieza, or cleansing, that centered on eliminating any trace of republican Spain. The use of the word “cleansing” was not a mere euphemism; rather it reflected the Franco regime’s belief that Spain’s body politic had been contaminated by a foreign virus that needed to be exterminated. This entailed executing hundreds of political dissidents in the wake of the Civil War in concentration camps, including socialists, anarchists, and regional nationalists, and stealing an untold number of newborn babies from their “red” mothers to give to conservative families to adopt. Franco also canceled the autonomy charters that the republic had granted to the Catalans and the Basques and banned all regional languages and symbols (including the Catalan language, its flag, and national holiday, the Diada). (Foreign Policy)
For over 35 years, in other words, it was illegal across Spain not just to express anti-Franco sentiments in Catalan, but to speak the language at all. I have friends whose parents and grandparents were born amidst this context; they were banned from learning Catalan as children, with consequences as extreme as the death penalty resulting from any violation.
Which is why that giant freestanding mouth is so significant. Catalonia is hardly the only Spanish region with its own language; the Basque Country, Galicia, and Valencia all have distinct native tongues which diverge disparately from Spanish (Google “Basque for beginners” if you’re looking to pick up a light autumn hobby) and were suppressed under Franco. But in their systems of education, these regions treat local languages more like foreign ones; they’re included in curriculums but not used as the primary means of instruction (Spanish is). Among young people, rates of fluency in each are either stagnant or plummeting.
Catalonia is the only Spanish region which has gone to such lengths to emphasize the preservation of its language. Mock La Queta’s massive chompers as you wish, but amidst local linguistic apathy throughout the Iberian peninsula the rate of young Catalan speakers has risen since the turn of this century. The government’s continued prioritization of language means primary instruction in Catalan is compulsory; Spanish is incorporated into curriculums much as a foreign language would be elsewhere.
In the region, that’s evident through far more than La Queta’s ubiquity. My grandparents lived in Barcelona for a year in the early sixties, and when I visited this August some friends and I tried to track down their old apartment. This was a difficult task on its face, but it was made nearly impossible by the fact that every Barcelona street sign had been replaced since Franco’s death in 1975; the Spanish street name my grandfather provided—“Calle Ali Bey”—now reads “Carrer d’Ali Bei.” In the meantime, many of the now-grandparents denied a Catalan education as children under Franco in the middle of the century picked up the language as soon as its use was legalized in the mid seventies. This includes one grandmother of a friend who insists on not just speaking with but texting her Catalan-fluent granddaughter in Catalan despite the fact that the grandmother never learned to write in Catalan.
Since 1975, Catalans have translated and replaced each of their street signs, building labels, and menu items—every imaginable public-facing text—and forced themselves to write in a language they cannot read not because it’s been necessary, or even particularly convenient, but because they’ve decided their language’s survival, following nearly four decades of its merciless suppression, is inextricable from their own. La Queta is the modern manifestation of a generational effort to preserve a culture living alongside the unceasing threat of hegemony.2
This summer, I spoke with a bunch of Catalans not named La Queta. They really did their best to stick to Spanish around me, but any time a group of more than a couple people formed and locals started addressing each other directly amidst a conversation I’d joined, they couldn’t help but to veer into Catalan. Sometimes they apologized; it was just too strange, they’d say, to talk to their childhood friends any other way.
I ended up horribly lost in most of those discussions, but how could I possibly have argued? I only talk, after all, to convey information. They speak to keep a language alive.
The fact that no Spanish is involved in the slogan gives away the target audience for the La Queta campaign: comprehension of basic Catalan is a prerequisite for understanding the advertisement itself. The campaign is not interested in proselytizing non-Catalan speakers, only encouraging hesitant bilingual residents to speak up.
In 2017, the Spanish government cracked down violently on Catalonia amidst a referendum which, had an October vote not been suppressed by national police forces, could well have have resulted in the permanent secession of the region from the Spanish state. Nine separatist political leaders ended up in jail for nearly four years in the aftermath of the chaos. You’re far more likely to hear cries of ¡Puta España! (“motherfucking Spain!”) on the streets of Catalan port city Tarragona than you are the nationalist ¡Viva España! The history is fraught, and it’s very much alive.