The Catalan schoolmistress who took a stand against independence

Dolores Agenjo takes out her phone and hurriedly swipes through it. Eager to make a point, the retired head teacher finds the message she was looking for and shows it to The Irish Times. It's from a former colleague, apologising for not "liking" any of her Facebook posts because he fears being identified as an opponent of Catalan independence, despite the fact he agrees with her outspoken convictions.

“There is a fear, a fear of being identified, of being on a blacklist,” Agenjo says.

She says that she was put on such a blacklist in November 2014. That was when she made headlines as the only head teacher in Catalonia who refused to hand over the keys to her school, in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, in order to allow it to be used as a polling station for a non-binding independence referendum deemed illegal by the Spanish government.

“I wasn’t in favour of the referendum anyway, but what was most important for me was the fact they were asking me to do something illegal,” she says. “They were asking me, as a civil servant, to break the law.”

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The fallout was dramatic and sometimes vicious, with Agenjo suddenly becoming a rare symbol of civic resistance against the swelling pro-independence tide. Supporters sent messages of support and flowers to her; others sent insults, or even death threats.

“I’ve always been very observant of hierarchies,” she says, as she recalls her refusal to obey the regional government official who requested the keys to the school. “If my boss tells me to do something, I try to do it . . . So it was very unpleasant to have to rebel.”

On Sunday, Catalans are again planning to vote on independence, although this time the stakes are much higher. The regional government says the referendum is binding, meaning it could in theory lead to secession. But it is still not clear if it will even take place. The Spanish justice system and government have already taken drastic actions to stop the vote, including arresting 14 members of the Catalan government last Wednesday and taking control of part of the region’s finances.

Political activism

Agenjo (62) has now retired from education, but her 2014 rebellion was just the start of her current political activism. After flirting with the far-left during her student days, which coincided with the end of the Franco dictatorship, she had spent more than three decades away from the front line.

“When democracy arrived, we voted on the [1978] constitution and that need to be involved in politics disappeared,” she says. She studied, became a Spanish language teacher and raised a family, all the time trying to ignore what she believed was the increasingly nationalist culture being imposed by the Catalan government on her region. She was particularly concerned at the increase in Catalan language use in schools at the cost of Castilian Spanish.

"I told myself that this was the price we had to pay," she says. "Because the Catalan nationalists are very fanatical and very stubborn and if we didn't cede on all this, they were going to cause a huge problem for Spain, they would push for independence. It was the lesser of two evils."

But for the last three years Agenjo has been involved in campaigning for a united Spain and, more recently, against a referendum she sees as unconstitutional.

The nationalist movement, she says, “pushed so much that there comes a point when you can’t stay quiet. Because whatever you give them, they will never give up their final objective, which is to build an independent state, because they have never had one before.”

Centralist tendencies

There are plenty of people in Catalonia and outside it who take another view, seeing a Spanish government whose centralist tendencies were fully reflected in last week’s police raids – a heavy-handed manoeuvre, they say, which has only served to inflame nationalist feeling further. Agenjo disagrees.

“The state has applied the law,” she says. “I’m satisfied, I thank the civil guard for acting. And it should go further, because those who should be arrested are the leaders: [Catalan president Carles] Puigdemont, [Catalan vice-president Oriol] Junqueras, those who are giving the orders.”

Such opinions tend to be associated with the Spanish right wing and Rajoy's conservative Popular Party (PP). But Agenjo is a prominent member of the recently formed Ahora platform, which describes itself as a leftist unionist organisation. Yet that doesn't stop strangers from calling her a "fascist" or even a "terrorist", as she says was the case when she and others took Spanish flags with them during a peace march through the streets of Barcelona in August following the Ramblas terror attack.

“Calling yourself Spanish is like being a terrorist for them,” she says.

On Sunday, Agenjo will be following events as closely as anyone, desperately hoping that the tide of Catalan secessionism of recent years is stopped once and for all.