Mural in tribute to Candel on Carrer de la Muga, in Marina de Port, commissioned by Sàpiens magazine and painted by muralist Roc Blackblock. © Enrique Marco
It’s striking that the first biography of the author of Els altres catalans [The Other Catalans] has taken so long to appear. Genís Sinca’s book (Comanegra, 2025) brims with passion, bringing us closer to a Candel who still feels vividly present today. Only through this biography can we fully appreciate the richness and nuance of his work. In this case, as in so few others, life and work are truly inseparable.
In 1951, at the very beginning of his book The Uprooted, Oscar Handlin wrote: “I once thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history”. Inspired by this Pulitzer Prize-winning book, a young John Fitzgerald Kennedy – not yet President of the United States – published a work in 1959 entitled A Nation of Immigrants. It was the theme of an era, but it also speaks to our present moment. Since the advent of capitalism and its relentless drive to generate economies of scale and seek economic specialisation on a geographical basis (a specialisation also shaped by processes of uneven development), the human condition has been inextricably bound up with that of the migrant. This global reality takes shape in specific contexts, and its significance is revealed by a select few who are able to convey its value. In the United States, that figure was Oscar Handlin; in Catalonia, it was Candel.
This alone speaks to the importance of Candel, by Genís Sinca (Comanegra, 2025). Candel is essential to understanding our own country – and to engaging with the debates and realities of an era in which migration has moved to the very heart of the global far right’s agenda. What we are now seeing in American cities under Trump’s rule is just one possible version of our own near future.
Book cover
In a work that is at once biography, literary composition and extended interview, Sinca – and, through him, Candel – returns to the early Candelian books: Hay una juventud que aguarda (1956) [There Is a Youth That Waits], Donde la ciudad cambia su nombre (1957) [Where the City Changes Its Name], Els altres catalans (1964) [The Other Catalans], and Ser obrero no es ninguna ganga (1968) [Being a Worker Is No Bargain]. What he offers, ultimately, is the story of the boy from the cheap housing estates of Can Tunis: “I lived here in a strange balance, between one world that was dying and another that was being born, in all its brutality”. A place – a here – he would never truly leave. A world shaped by the wave of migration surrounding Barcelona’s second Universal Exposition (1929); by migrant neighbourhoods where, before the war, much of the population was aligned with anarchism, and afterwards with the tension between socially engaged Catholicism and the communism of the PSUC. A world in which the Republic took concrete form – eradicating childhood trachoma and founding secular, co-educational, pedagogically advanced schools, where children like Candel learned things that would stay with them for life. A world, in short, where hardship could only be endured through shared values and the life stories – both possible and impossible – of everyday heroes, those who built “the foundations of a strong civil society” with a “hidden strength”. This was the basis of resistance under the dictatorship – and later, of defiance.
The peripheries: where history changes course
Sinca shows how Candel found himself at the heart of one of those crossroads where a country undergoes transformation – even if that imagined community known as Catalonia wasn’t even aware of it. In fact, history usually changes course on the peripheries, even though it’s the centres that claim to be the guardians of the essence and the authors of the national narrative. And it’s precisely here that Candel becomes an essential point of connection: helping the country become more self-aware, giving voice to those who had been silenced – whether by choice or by force – placing them at the heart of both the debate and the narrative. It’s likely that only someone like him could have done it. So much so that his best-known work came out of a commission in which, as Sinca recounts, Pujol, Benet and Max Cahner were involved. But regardless of that commission and the need to connect the “old” Catalonia with the new, it was Candel’s voice and life experience that ultimately prevailed. Max Cahner had commissioned him to write a book to be titled Nosaltres, els inmigrants [We, the Immigrants], inspired by Joan Fuster’s Nosaltres, els valencians [We, the Valencians] (1962). But Candel opted for a title that became a way of explaining the country: Els altres catalans, because they were not merely immigrants, but already an integral part of the country itself. In this way, while Vicens Vives had codified Catalan identity in his Notícia de Catalunya [News of Catalonia] (1954) – a book that established enduring myths and which he too had wished to title Nosaltres, els catalans – Candel turned that idea on its head, bringing the imagined, self-contained Catalonia closer to a real, and therefore possible, one.
Sinca’s book conveys Candel’s message that a “pure” Catalonia – now once again fashionable to champion – cannot come to terms with the real Catalonia.
This is probably the heart of Sinca’s book and its principal strength: conveying Candel’s message that a “pure” Catalonia – now once again fashionable to champion – cannot come to terms with the real Catalonia. It ends up diminishing itself by posing as a nation, when in reality it merely presents itself as a “harassed” ethnic minority seeking the protections afforded to national minorities within Europe. As Sinca recounts at the end of the book, quoting Candel directly, the problem isn’t migration. The problem is recognising that migration as the source of new Catalans and, from there, beginning a path in which all voices can claim ownership of the country. The problem isn’t migration but making Catalan identity a threshold of exclusion that conceals the true boundaries of inequality. The problem isn’t migration; it’s a culture that, while aspiring to be “global”, is in fact – and here Candel aligns with Michael Billig’s Banal Nationalism – a nation-building project on a global scale which, under the ideal of the West, seeks to homogenise diversity into an imagined culture and mythology rooted in the United States.
Perhaps the book’s greatest merit lies in how it brings us closer to Candel’s role in the debate on Catalan identity through the story of his own life. One might argue that this leads Sinca to overemphasise the influence of certain figures in Candel’s life – such as Jordi Pujol – or that it would have been valuable to learn more about Candel’s role in anti-Francoist cultural circles, or about the Candel of democratic Spain. But doing so would likely have made the work monumental, more fitting for the domain of historians – even if it would also have brought us closer to other ways of understanding Catalonia.
Candel. Genís Sinca
Comanegra, 2025 320 pages.