Juana Dolores: from the procés to pro-independence classism

Juana Dolores and the class hatred hidden behind the procés

On 25 August 2026, the writer and playwright Juana Dolores, 34, blew up her own past. In an interview on TV3, reported by El Mundo, she acknowledged that she had been burning bins in Urquinaona alongside 16-year-old kids from the Zona Franca and that it «wasn't just about independence, it was about class hatred». She now maintains that the independence movement is in the hands of «bitter racists» and is considering stopping writing in Catalan.

The shift is no small matter. For years Juana Dolores was an icon of pro-independence cultural activism. Her new discourse vindicates the role of the Castilian-speaking working-class population in defending Catalan and rejects the idea that the language belongs to the elites. The response from the most identity-driven sector was not long in coming: her origins are recalled before her militancy. It matters little that she left her skin on the street: surname and cradle weigh more than years of the procés.

The procés as an elite business: the economic reading

There is a reading that goes beyond biographical anecdote and connects with the economy. The pro-independence narrative, the most sceptical analyses maintain, was the perfect smokescreen for a bourgeoisie that lost its industrial fabric with entry into the European Community and today lives off tourism and the Generalitat's budget. The procés's side businesses, subsidies and crony appointments replaced the factory as a tool of social cohesion.

That elite, they point out, no longer has money to hand out to buy loyalties. Since 2017 it has been operating on life support, with the regional government controlled from Moncloa. The «window of opportunity» that peine in 2012 closed in false: the census that sustained it has aged, and in 2026 Catalonia more than half the population under 50 does not have Spanish nationality.

The urban landscape reflects the change. In neighbourhoods that were a stronghold of popular Catalanism, such as Sants or Gràcia, commerce has reoriented towards tourists and the local population towards foreigners. Those who describe this transformation sum up the result with an image: the Catalan popular power that was sung about in demonstrations is today reduced to elderly people with walkers.

Racism or class tribalism?

To the question of whether the independence movement is racist, the answers bifurcate. One current responds with another question: what race are Catalans? And it maintains that what is denounced as racism is, in reality, an identity-based classism that uses language and ancestry to mark distance from the Castilian-speaking immigrant worker, even when the latter has adopted Catalan culture.

The other current sees it more simply: you don't need a sociology treatise to read the accusation of «bitter racists» as the confirmation of a political culture that measures belonging by loyalty to the narrative, not by facts.

That this story is now told by someone who was burning bins in Urquinaona is, at the very least, uncomfortable. The case is not an anecdote of a famous repentant; it is the blind spot where the pro-independence narrative, lacking economic results and demographic replacement, meets the reality of those who made it possible. And there the analysis stops, without consensus: a change of convictions or a new calculation of opportunities? Time, and the next subsidies, will tell.