All these things were illegal by laws backed and supported by the highest, most sensible and most respected authorities back in the time, even during centuries.
But it was the determination of people to be able to make all these illegal things fully legal nowadays. This is progress.
If people wants, anything is possible. Laws are to serve people, and if they do not work, they should be changed.
People can even change a constitution.
To help you fully understand the context, the Spanish constitution was written only 3 years after a military dictatorship that lasted 40 years (2 generations) with many people afraid of the military coming back and the police charging in people's demonstrations.
I do not know if you ever have had to run in a demonstration with a policeman running behind you with a gun with a clear intent to shoot you. I did and believe me, it is really scary. You even develop a sense of foreigness for certain symbols.
The Spanish constitution can and should be changed to meet the needs of people in the 21st century. The one we have now is the bastard child of the turmoil after the military dictatorship.
Well, there was a bit more to it than that. If it had just been a matter of the Constitution being flaunted, and citizens being denied their rights... we might have just had a prolonged crisis, with a long period of generalized instability and violence towards minorities (kind of like we seem to be entering, in the present day).
But unfortunately the CSA had to go out of their way to initiate an all-out armed provocation with the Union, which basically forced the latter's hand, by that point. You know, this little ruckus:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Fort_Sumter
In any case all this post-facto niceness about "protecting the Constitution" and all is -- just that. Invented after the fact, to help the nation recover from what was (at the time) one of the most devastating armed conflicts the planet had hitherto known.
I thought about twice per your request, and I'm afraid that with my support for Catalonia's self-determination rights I'm defending individual rights. Otherwise, I would become the first ethnic totalitarian on Earth who loved immigration and helped immigrants to settle.
How do you like immigration yourself? I'm asking because the Head of the Partido Popular (Spanish central government) in Catalonia hates it [1], he is a declared xenophobe and such proneness to xenophobia often permeates to other supporters of Partido Popular and similar right-wing parties.
[1] http://ccaa.elpais.com/ccaa/2015/07/28/catalunya/1438078282_...
For your information, I do like immigration, and I'm in favor of trilingual school in the Catalan region of Spain (Spanish, Catalan, English), and the more immigration coming to Spain, the better for the country, that would mean that the economy is recovering and people is willing to bet for it. BTW, you can not judge an organization based on the opinions of one person (even if what you say about that person could be true, or not). Xenophobe examples by the Catalan nationalism are endless.
I know the Catalan nationalism arguments, and I can dismount them one by one. So you're wasting your time with your propaganda on me.