"Ja sóc aquí": Self-Government Restored
After huge demonstrations, the exiled president Josep Tarradellas returns, the Generalitat is restored, and Jordi Pujol spends 23 years building Catalan institutions within Spain.
- Catalonia since the Spanish Civil War: Reconstructing the Nation — Andrew Dowling, Sussex Academic Press (2013)
- Catalan Nationalism: Francoism, Transition and Democracy — Montserrat Guibernau, Routledge (2004)
- Catalonia: Nation Building Without a State — Kenneth McRoberts, Oxford University Press (2001)
- Singular and Plural: Ideologies of Linguistic Authority in 21st Century Catalonia — Kathryn A. Woolard, Oxford University Press (2016)
On 11 September 1977 a vast crowd, estimated by organisers at a million people, marched in Barcelona for an autonomy statute. That month Adolfo Suárez’s government restored the Generalitat provisionally, and on 23 October Josep Tarradellas, president in exile since 1954, returned to Barcelona and greeted the crowds from the Generalitat’s balcony with the words “Ciutadans de Catalunya, ja sóc aquí!” (“Citizens of Catalonia, I am here!”).
- Catalonia since the Spanish Civil War: Reconstructing the Nation — Andrew Dowling, Sussex Academic Press (2013)
- Enciclopèdia Catalana (enciclopedia.cat) — Grup Enciclopèdia, Grup Enciclopèdia Catalana
A new Statute of Autonomy was approved in a referendum in October 1979, and in 1980 Jordi Pujol’s centre-right nationalist coalition, Convergència i Unió, won the first Catalan election. Pujol governed until 2003. His government’s 1983 language normalisation law began a school system in which Catalan became the main language of instruction, the “immersion” model, designed so that every child, whatever their home language, would leave school fluent in both Catalan and Spanish. TV3 began broadcasting the same year. Pujol’s reputation collapsed in 2014 when he admitted his family had kept an undeclared fortune abroad for decades.
- Singular and Plural: Ideologies of Linguistic Authority in 21st Century Catalonia — Kathryn A. Woolard, Oxford University Press (2016)
- Catalonia: Nation Building Without a State — Kenneth McRoberts, Oxford University Press (2001)
- The Rise of Catalan Independence: Spain's Territorial Crisis — Andrew Dowling, Routledge (2018)
Why it matters today
The Catalan school system, the public broadcaster TV3, the Mossos d'Esquadra police and the language laws all come from this period. For many Catalans it was a time of building the country "from within" Spain, a strategy many independentists now consider exhausted.