INTRODUCTIONTopic Area of Research
Study of gender, migration and intercultural interactions in urban spaces and/or social movements with particular emphasis on local communities.
Goal of the ResearchGoal of the ResearchBased on a gender and positionality perspective, the goal of the research is to investigate: a) the migrants’ use of the urban spaces and the changes of the city, b) formal and informal practices in local communities and neighbourhoods in which intercultural interactions take place, c) migrants’ citizenship practices in their local and transnational lives.
ObjectivesObjectives- To undertake research on the intersection between gender, migration and intercultural interactions in urban spaces and/or social movements with particular emphasis on local communities, neighbourhoods and the production of transnational «homes».
- To study formal and informal practices of assimilation, integration, and/or marginalisation as well as forms of resistance to established power relations in urban spaces and social movements, and to assess their impact on gender relations.
- To develop an alternative framework for understanding local communities, neighbourhoods and transnational “homes” as material spaces of intercultural interaction with particular emphasis on identifying resistances and examples of best practices.
- To explore political and theoretical perspectives through which both conflict and dialogue between natives and migrant groups can be accommodated in local context and explore the possibilities of urban social movements contributing to intercultural relations.
Basic Premises and Concepts
The purpose of this research is to analyse the role of urban public spaces in the creation of intercultural and social inclusion/exclusion relations. We focus on the use and appropriation of these spaces from a gender approach that considers specifically the experiences of migrant families. Besides, we use the feminist concept of positionality to understand how the social situatedness of migrants conditions their practices of citizenship (gender, ethnicity, education, immigration status, social class, age and generations, length of stay, and migration experiences).
We consider public spaces as privileged places of interaction and participation, which are crucial to the formation of the identification processes and to the construction of citizenship. Public spaces are understood in a broad sense, that includes those in the open air and those in premises, public and private, such as squares, streets, parks, commercial areas, cultural, health, entertainment facilities, etc.; in sum, public places of encounter and confrontation in the city. A specific area of study has been chosen considering its diversity in terms of the origin of the population. As people’s daily practices and experiences are very important to evaluate places and taking into account the social diversity and difference, the challenge is to see the different uses of these spaces and the access to the social rights linked to gender, age, social class and origin variables.
The urban public space, especially in big cities, has always been subject to tensions and conflicts between different functions and actors that have diverse uses and interests. The increase in the heterogeneity and stratification of urban populations is an expression of what Sassen (1992) has denominated the Global City
The emergence of the globalised city goes hand in hand with a confluence and polarisation of new labour niches which are growing but precarised and other labour niches which agglutinate control tasks. These tendencies are manifested in the increasing segmentation and ethnification of labour markets. Although some immigrant workers access stable, high-qualification and high-salary jobs, the great majority of them can only find employment in the most deregularised sectors.
. This increasing diversity and stratification challenges the policies that act on the public space, which can no longer consist simply of a general offer, aimed at supposedly homogenous great collectives, but they must deal with diversified –and occasionally confronted- demands, while trying to preserve at the same time that which is essential to the concept of public space: its being open to all citizens, under equal conditions of access and enjoyment (Aramburu Otazu, 2009).
We propose the idea of citizenship as social practice that migrants engage at multiple scales and within multiples public spheres across national boundaries. From this point of view, the urban spaces are a privileged place to understand migrant citizenship practices.
When it comes to analysing migrants’ participation in public spaces, we consider some of Saskia Sassen’s theoretical suggestions (2003), referring to the practices that update the citizenship as constant social inventions that have an equivalent in the law. The author relates this de facto citizenship with the presence but also with actions in the public domain which provide subjects, who are not usually taken into account in the public sphere, with recognition and legitimacy. The term presence refers to the condition of political agents of subjects who are subordinate or stripped of power. So, immigrants without documents are people whose unauthorised presence generates rights. On the opposite side Sassen places women: in the case of immigrant women, their role as sustainers of survival and family welfare often functions as a transforming element that drives their participation in the public space. The home, the community, the neighbourhood and the school thus become spaces where women are key actors. When they are lived or experienced as non political spheres, those spaces are turned into “microenvironments with a global scope” (Vega Solís and Gil Araujo 2003).
This dynamic idea of citizenship linked with the production of the presence by the powerless enables us to see citizenship as a field in dispute, which can be occupied. A view which in a way is connected with the definition of political society proposed by Chatterjee (2008), which refers to the never unified presence of the citizens as fragmented groups with particular interests. From his point of view, in contemporary societies rights are acquired far more often through claims and demands than through the law. The success of those claims depends completely on the skill of the particular population groups that express them in mobilising support and influencing the implementation of public policies in their favour. (Chatterjee 2008, 134). The political society is a direct expression of social antagonisms and its logic implies the heterogeneous and fragmented conquest of rights.
The potential of the exercise of citizenship as the “right to the city” and the mutual recognition of subjects connected in many cross border circuits involves assuming the capacity for action which is exercised against the constraints of state and economic citizenship. According to Sassen’s analysis, global citizenship today occupies a special place in the cities and in the interconnection of transnational networks and circuits. The city is turned into a space where non-formal political subjects construct a political scene that allows a wide range of interventions (neighbourhoods, assemblies, self managed spaces, struggles for immigrants’ rights, protests over cutbacks in public services), and encourages the formation of new subjectivities and territories for experiments, aside from the formal political system.
In a similar sense, Balibar argues that citizenship is not an institution or a status but a collective practice. For this author, the struggles of undocumented immigrants have proven that it is not necessary to be a national to contribute in a responsible manner to the life of the city. Immigrants’ participation provides the political activity with “the transnational dimension that we are so much in need of to open perspectives for social transformation and civility in the era of mundialisation” (Balibar 2005, 29).
Taking trans-border bonds as field for analysis allows us to assess the impact of global processes – such as international migrations or sexual and international division of labour – within the domestic sphere, thus approaching the analysis of the affection and care organisation in social transnational spaces without neglecting the role of state regulations in the modulation of these interchanges. Family transnationalism takes place across state borders which are ruled by regulations (migration policies, citizenship regimes, incorporation models) that may deepen or restrict transnational practices. Inclusion and exclusion state regulations in the countries of destination and origin affect the daily life of those involved in the micro-politics of the formation of transnational families, with their wide variety of combinations and recombinations (Sorensen 2008, 275). Changes in migration legislation constantly redefine family relations in the migration process.
Lastly, although the outsider status of (im)migrant workers results in part from permanent inequalities inherited from the colonial era, their peripheral condition is reproduced through migration policies, business strategies, gender relations, stigmatisation, racialisation, and other dominant visions and di-visions. Narratives of integration of these (post)colonial subjects have in no cases implied equality
From a de-colonising perspective, the structures created during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries play an important role in the present, even though the exclusions generated by the epistemological, racial, and gender hierarchies of modernity have been re-signified by contemporary global capitalism. Following the work of sociologist Aníbal Quijano, the idea of the coloniality of power expresses one of the constitutive elements of contemporary patterns of power: “the imposition of an ethnic/racial classification on the world’s population as a cornerstone for said pattern of power [which] operates on material and subjective planes, realms, and dimensions of social existence and on a societal scale” (Quijano 2000: 342)
. The discourse of integration is, among other things, a discourse on forms of identification, both native and foreign, and more definitively, on the unequal power relations that these identifications imply. The notion of integration is interwoven with the paradigm of national construction utilised in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to create unified national territories out of a patchwork of religions and groups of diverse nature, as was characteristic in Europe. The application of the integration concept to the field of immigration is a recent adaptation of old ideas and instruments of domestication and social inclusion which operate in diverse areas such as education, moral and civic instruction, and social policy. This move was instigated via the identification of the social arena as a territory needing specific intervention to avert the dangers of social dis-integration (and not to overcome social inequalities). Some of the current positions taken on the integration of immigrants recall the technologies of moral training once applied to the labouring classes and their families as a key instrument of government. The term ‘integration’ and its synonyms essentially point to all kinds of mechanisms and structures directed at reproducing a unified solidarity that overcomes the various fractures (class, gender, origin, and race) that threaten the social and national order.
In the analysis we present in these pages, we start with the premise that forms of thinking and doing are not mere pieces of objective data but rather they represent a territory for exploration, as they are contingent products of multiple, interwoven, social, political, and economic processes, both from the past and in the present. While migration may be a universal phenomenon, there are important variations in the ways in which it is perceived and constructed according to its historical and geographic contexts. The same happens with concepts such as integration, interculturality, security/insecurity, and, of course, citizenship. For that reason, here we propose to take all these concepts not as a fact or a starting point, but as a field of exploration. Following Leitner and Ehrkamp’s (2006) suggestion, in our research, one of our main interests is to pay attention to the meaning and value assigned by the migrant population to local belonging, their ways of appropriating the spaces where they live and their imaginaries around the idea of citizenship.
Research Methodology
We have chosen a specific area of study considering its diversity in terms of origin of the population. The fieldwork took place in Poble Sec, Barcelona, a working-class neighbourhood which, in January 2008, registered an immigrant population of 27.9%. Pakistanis and Moroccans are the largest groups, followed by a wide variety of other nationalities. However, the most visible section of the population in the use of public space is Latin American, especially Dominican.
The aim was to focus on three public spaces: a) Blai St., a very busy pedestrian and commercial thoroughfare with small shops, a large proportion of which is staffed by immigrants, and b) Surtidor Square, where the local Civic Centre provides social and cultural services for migrants and locals alike (including Catalan language lessons) and c) the Health Centre, which serves every member of the community. The first two spaces – Blai St. and Surtidor Square- make an excellent field for analysing the use of public space by the newcomers and the local population (already quite mixed between native Catalans and Spanish migrants arrived since the 1960s).
The fieldwork in Poble Sec began in January 2009 and continued until January 2010. Before starting the in-depth interviews, the research team did a series of floating and participant observations and worked in the neighbourhood to establish a trustworthy network of contacts to talk to.
Data Collection
The research was based on a qualitative methodological perspective from a gender approach. Fieldwork methods involved: mapping of the neighbourhood (uses, activities etc.), participant observation (spaces of leisure and aggregation organised and attended by migrant women and men, such as markets and stores, urban parks, coffee shops, “ethnic” food stores, hairdressers and beauty shops), interviews with locals, users and planners.
Summary of followed steps and methods of data collection:
a) Adaptation of the methodological framework agreed between the partners of WP7
b) Selection of neighbourhood as case study in which field work would be conducted
c) Development of ‘interview guides’. Below is the layout for the subject blocks for the in-depth interviews addressed to migrant women and men agreed between the partners.
- Interview schedule:
Name of interviewee (please note that all names were changed):
Age of person interviewed:
Sex of person interviewed:
Date of interview:
- History of the migrant family
Country and city of origin; life before migration; motivation to emigrate and migration process; people living with her/him here; difficulties for her/him to settle here.
- Legal, labour, education and family situation
Current legal status; access to nationality; job (what, how it was obtained, difficulty to obtain for a man/woman or not, conditions, comparison with job in place of origin, future); income management; educational level of origin and other courses/studies carried out here. Negotiations in gender and generational relationships: responsibility on domestic and family occupations; reunification process (any family member joined, how); type of lifestyle here (including way of bringing up children).
- Use of public spaces in the city and in the neighbourhood.
About the neighbourhood (election, satisfaction, places used –why and with whom-, places for relax, places they avoid –why-, where their children/young people go -boys/girls-; facilities/services used in the neighbourhood and level of satisfaction (for him/her, children, young people, women, elderly). About the city: other neighbourhoods visited (which, why). Use of free time. Differences between public life here and in place of origin.
- Participation in associations, schools, etc.
Membership of any association (which, why, with whom, relationships there, satisfaction, gaps founded); participation in parents-teachers associations; experiences as students.
- Transnational practices and the use of public spaces
Use of call-centre (when, person/s of contact, topics of conversation, use as a meeting point); remittances management; investments in housing/businesses; social remittances (transnational motherhood);satisfaction of living in Barcelona, Athens, Bologna; main problems faced here; ideas about return; plans for the future; children’s plans for the future and their opinion on them.
d) Interviews with natives, key informants, experts and politics leaders.
e) ‘Observation guidelines’ (for the different types of locations)
f) Focus group, especially with the social movements in the neighbourhoods
g) Compilation of statistics and official documents
Eventually, the fieldwork carried out in Poble Sec was:
- 16 Participant observations:
- 16:30-17.30hs (Monday) Blai St. (January)
- 19:30-22:00hs (Tuesday) Café Bar Benaji (January)
- 15:00-16:30hs (Tuesday) Blai St. and Health Centre Les Hortes (January)
- 18:30-19:15hs (Tuesday) Library (January)
- 14:00-15:00hs (Wednesday) Health Centre Les Hortes and Blai St. (January)
- 11.00-13:00hs (Wednesday) Blai St. and Health Centre Les Hortes (January)
- 20:20-22:00hs (Wednesday) Blai St. (January)
- 18:00-20:00hs (Tuesday) Blai St. and Health Centre Les Hortes (January)
- 20:00-21:30hs (Thursday) Blai St. (January)
- 16:15-17:15hs (Monday) Plaça del Setge de 1714 (March)
- 11:30-13:00 (Local Entities Fair), Blai St. (May)
- 15:30-17:00 (Wednesday) Sortidor Square (April)
- 12:30- 14:00 (Saturday) Sortidor Square (May)
- 21:00-23:00 (Friday) Sortidor Square (June)
- Local festival:
- 14:00-17:00 pm (Saturday) around Blai St. (July)
- 20:30-23:30 pm (Tuesday) around Blai St. (July)
- 20:30–23:00 pm (Thursday) around Blai St. (July)
- 20:30-1:00 pm (Thursday) Blai St.- Bar Bukowski (October)
- Informal conversations along Blai St. to establish contact with the migrant population involved in local trading activity.
- Interviews in depth with:
18 migrants of whom:
- 11 migrant women from Dominican Republic, China, Venezuela, Bangladesh, Ecuador, Bolivia and Argentina.
- 7 migrant men from Dominican Republic, Pakistan, Brasil and Argentina
Native population
The criteria we have established are:
- First immigrants: people who arrived in the neighbourhood around 1950-60 (2 interviews)
- Immigrants from the second wave (2 interviews)
Young people (natives and foreigners) who came to the area because it is central, it has reasonable prices to rent or buy, and they are very taken with the “cultural diversity” of Poble Sec (2 interviews)
- Interviews with 13 key informants:
- 3 members of the business association
- the native priest who has been working with migrants since 2000
- 2 social workers from Poble-Sec per a Tothom (Poble Sec for Everybody: a social platform formed by individuals and social-cultural associations whose aim is to foster local coexistence)
- 2 teachers of Spanish and Catalan languages from an NGO and an institutional organisation
- Interviews with members of the Catalan Parliament to find out the different conceptions of diversity, citizenship, the migrant population’s access to political rights and the role of the different levels of government in the construction of immigration policy.
- Interviews with the staff at the Health Centre.Fieldwork Contextualization: Poble Sec, a Neighbourhood Populated by Interstate and International Migration
The city of Barcelona has 1,638,433 inhabitants (data of January 2009) and foreign residents are 294,918, which means that they represent 18.1% of the total population. The city is divided in 10 districts and 38 boroughs.
Poble Sec has a total population of 40,650 inhabitants. The number of foreign residents at January 2009 is 11,588 = 28.5% of the total population.
Pakistanis 1,357
Moroccans 1,012
Philippines 982
Dominicans 734
Italians 715
Ecuadorians 705
Poble Sec is a borough in the Sants-Montjuïc district –the largest of the ten districts of Barcelona– and has three special elements that distinguish it from other boroughs in the city: it is located at the foot of Montjuïc hill, it is very close to the sea and it has the Avenida del Paralelo, an avenue which was famous in past decades for its theatres, cabarets and cafés which today are struggling to keep their doors open. Those three elements, among others, have marked and continue to mark the idiosyncrasy of the borough.
Source: Barcelona council website.
Source: Barcelona council website
Poble Sec is a working class borough –incomes vary between 90% and 70% of the Barcelona average– which in the early 20th century, especially from 1911 to 1930, was populated by people arriving in Barcelona from Aragón, Valencia, Murcia and Galicia to work in the textile factories that had opened there and in the surroundings, or on the building of the Barcelona underground railway (inaugurated in 1924), or the pavilions of the Universal Exhibition –held in 1929– on Montjuïc hill. That migratory flow was the turning point that transformed not only the demographic, social, cultural and urban structure of Barcelona, but that of those points of the city where the new arrivals were settling in a rather disorderly manner.
Between the 1950s and 1970s another flow of migrants from different regions of Spain also settled as best they could in Poble Sec. The lack of planning is a significant element for understanding the evolution of a borough, ignored by the council at the time, where it was the people who organised themselves in their everyday spaces and built indispensable infrastructures such as the sewers or the electric network, thus giving rise to the phenomenon known as “shanty town”.
Although it is true that the Civil War brought the growth of the shanty towns to a halt, the wave of immigration that arrived in Barcelona between 1950 and 1970 brought them back with a vengeance. In 1957, as many as 52,377 persons were counted living in the shanty towns of Montjuïc. Many of those families, who came from rural areas, found themselves in a hostile city, with no infrastructures to receive them, sometimes they did not find work, the shacks did not have minimum facilities, such as a sink, and they underwent a dramatic process of degradation...” (CERHISEC
CERHISEC (Poble-Sec Historical Research Centre)
,2003).
In the 1960s a policy of eliminating the shanty towns was launched, but some small clusters managed to survive for far longer, so much so that at the end of December 1986 300 shacks could still be counted in Poble Sec. And in a survey published in “La Voz de la Montaña” the presence of a few North Africans was already registered. But in 1990, with the imminence of the Olympic Games that were to be held in 1992, the number of shanties in the whole of Barcelona fell from 1102 to 0.
Previously, in the 1980s, Poble Sec had lived through an ageing process and the young people had gradually left the borough for better equipped sectors of the city. Rental apartments remained empty and the Poble Sec of that time had one of the largest supplies of rental accommodation in the city (almost 60% of the housing), as well as bars and shops that had been closed and not handed on the next generation.
At the end of the 90s, the residents of the borough –Catalan, Aragones, Andalusian, Castilian...– were stupefied to see the gradual but steady influx, not only of young people from other boroughs of Barcelona, drawn by the reasonable rents, but also of immigrants from different parts of the world. Those international migrants (Pakistani, Moroccan, Philippine, Latin American...) settled in Poble Sec in what was to be the first stage of their migratory process and it was therefore very likely that they would later reunite their families, something they began to do in the first years of the 21st century. Since 2002 the borough has undergone major demographic growth since the population has risen from 35,130 inhabitants to the 40,650 today, of whom 11,588 are foreign residents, 28.5%.
This immigration has rejuvenated the borough and provided an interesting mixture of groups which is reflected in the streets, with Latin American, Lebanese, Pakistani, Indian and Chinese shops, hairdressing salons, call shops, restaurants, cafeterias, greengrocers and small supermarkets. All that has brought a growing commercial dynamism which has attracted both sculptors and craftsmen who have opened small shop-studios and new residents with a different socio-economic profile.
FIELDWORK FINDINGSInternational Migration and Urban Transformations
In cities which have succeeded in reinventing themselves over and over again such as Barcelona, neighbourhoods like Poble Sec have discovered in the past decade the value of commercial hospitality and the importance of “ethnic” shops, bars and restaurants as agents for revitalising an area which was in serious decline. Like in other city districts where immigration has taken hold, places to eat and drink but also call centres, fruit and vegetable shops, hairdresser’s, jeweller’s, etc. have been opened by the newcomers along Blai St. and have come to occupy an important role in the production of new forms of neighbourhood living.
In 2001 the local government’s initiative to make Blai St. pedestrian also encouraged trade in the shape of businesses managed by the migrant population and the old deserted shops were quickly acquired or rented mainly by Pakistanis, Dominicans and Chinese who created what Saskia Sassen calls “a low-cost equivalent of gentrification… Small investments become neighbourhood upgrading because of the residential concentration of immigrants”.
The interviews with immigrants residing in Poble Sec since the late 1990s provide evidence of the important transformation in the composition of the neighbourhood’s population. These changes refer to the increase in the number of different kinds of shops (greengrocer’s, butcher’s, hairdresser’s, locutorios, bars) managed by immigrants, but they also refer to the growing presence of neighbours of immigrant origin since the beginnings of the 21st century, which resulted first from the arrival of Dominicans, followed by Ecuadorians and other Latin Americans, and which has then been augmenting and diversifying since 2003, with the arrival of immigrants from Pakistan and China. Many of these immigrants, especially the Dominicans, have moved to Poble Sec from other areas of Barcelona because the cost of renting or buying a property was more affordable for them. However, the urbanistic and commercial operation of reconfiguring the neighbourhood into a multicultural and leisure territory has skyrocketed real estate prices, and for some years now, families of immigrant origin who want to have a house of their own have been forced to move to other areas in the suburbs of Barcelona, such as Hospitalet de Llobregat, which came up in different interviews with Dominicans and Pakistanis. It is interesting to remember that Hospitalet is a neighbourhood in the outskirts of Barcelona known for its high concentration of Castilian-speaking, working-class population, coming from other points of Spain.
In our interviews we could observe that this kind of commercial spaces brought into discussion not only notions of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism but made obvious “the gap between the ideal of unconditional hospitality -openness to the other- and the various ways in which hospitality is conditioned” (Bell, 2007).
As one of our interviewees said, “people have been coming from abroad for some 10 years now, but on Blai St., shops have been changing for about 5 years and now its rather immigrant people who are in charge of them. The thing is that those who had shops before have already retired and their sons or daughters have not wanted to continue with the business” (70-year-old Catalan woman, neighbour of Poble Sec and of Blai St. “since always”)
On the subject of the hairdresser, it is very interesting to contrast the opinion of a young Dominican woman who has opened a shop in the neighbourhood. When we asked her if besides her young Latin American clientele she has native middle aged women, she explained: “What happens is that here it is difficult to get a base clientele... I think people here tend to stick to what is habitual for them. In our country, it is us young people who worry more about our looks. Here it is older people, and they have been going to the same hairdresser’s for 20 years, so that is why it is difficult to form a clientele here”(Dominican woman has been living in Poble Sec for 10 years).
As different authors have already pointed out, the concept of commercial hospitality is full of ambivalence: on the one hand, for example, people who have to put up with the crazy Spanish working hours (usually 9 a.m to 2 pm and 4 to 8 pm) are most thankful for the long opening hours of the Pakistani and Latin American food shops (usually 9 a.m. to 10pm) but this irritates their local counterparts who keep the old working timetable with a break at midday.
The concept of hospitality is situated within a constellation marked by distinct ambivalences; these include tensions between hospitality and hostility, proximity and distance, belonging and being foreign, inclusion and exclusion (Friese, 2004; Dikeç, 2002).
Probably one of the most expressive manifestations of all the negative feelings -hostility, distance, exclusion- are the comments of the owner of a local pork butcher’s shop who has lived in Blai St. for 50 years but now yearns to retire, sell his flat and move out of Poble Sec: “In this activity of commerce, they [the immigrants] have also screwed everything up for us. The thing is that they only consume in their shops, they do not buy these products, and if they come, the few that come only take a euro of this and a euro of that and that’s it. Then I have lost many customers, because 30% has left and the other 40% has died” (Native man has had his shop in Poble Sec for 30 years).
Improving the Neighbourhood through Trading Activities: Poble Sec Traders Association
In 2005 the Poble Sec Traders Association was formed, bringing together native and migrant populations around the improvement of the neighbourhood and the maintenance of trading activity. One important line of work of the Association is “selling” Poble Sec as a place to enjoy leisure, culture and commerce. As a triptych distributed by them and written in Catalan, Spanish and English reads:
“In Poble Sec you’ll find a wide range of leisure activities at all hours: landmark venues, the trendiest night-clubs, fun activities for children, walks in the park, restaurants and lots more!”
In this case the idea of commercial hospitality goes hand in hand with the idea of regeneration and rebranding of the neighbourhood as a pleasure zone thriving with new “ethnic” restaurants and bars staffed by migrants. In the past five years eating and drinking spaces have proliferated, and most of them are managed or staffed by migrant people. But, according to Nadja Monet (2002), the “ethnic” touch of certain bars or restaurants –which can be seen either in their decoration or in the exhibition of national products, or in the music they play, etc.- favours the concentration of certain people in them but at the same time makes others go away. This is quite important for coexistence since in some places there is a tendency to attract an exclusive clientele on a national belonging base and this appropriation of a public place by a specific group weighs on the choice of other potential clients.
One interesting and very visible “ethnic” place in Poble Sec is the Morroccan tea-shop at the entrance of Blai St. The decoration has all been brought from that country, the owners and staff also come from there and yet the clientele is almost 100% from here, basically middle-class middle-aged women. When we asked a younger woman who lives in the neighbourhood about the tea-shop she said: “It is folkloric. It is set up as a show. The exotic touch sells. The clientele is from here. There is never anybody from abroad, not even Moroccan” (Catalan woman, 30 years old, has been living in Poble Sec for 5 years), and a young Morrocan woman who works nearby explained to us: “I went two or three times... but then, since I know how to make the tea and it is something I have every day and it is easy, and economically it does not cost you anything... So when I went in... what was I going to order? I ordered tea. Then they bring you a little tea pot and they tell you it’s 2,80 €. So I find it a little exaggerated to pay 2,80 €... And there were no Moroccans. And then the atmosphere is very pretty, but it’s an atmosphere we know and in which we have lived all our life, so no, no... (Moroccan woman works at the ATIMCA office in Poble Sec).
But there are other bars and discotheques which are patronised by specific groups of migrants who live in Poble Sec or in other city districts, and by natives who come to the area to enjoy themselves during the weekend with the resulting noise and complaints from the neighbours. When we have asked people about the flow of visitors at different hours of the day and different days of the week, it was clear that there is a great difference between mornings, afternoons and nights, between weekdays and weekends and between the movements of migrants and native people. As one of our interviewees said: “During the week there is more Latin population on the streets, not in the bars. There is like a social use of the street. During the weekends, there are more autochthonous people consuming in bars, people come from other neighbourhoods. And the others retreat” (Catalan woman, 30 years old, has been living in Poble Sec for 5 years).
Poble Sec and Culture: The Other “Selling” Aspect of the Area
“All the culture you are looking for is in Poble Sec: the Victòria Theatre, the Mercat de les Flors, the Grec Theatre, libraries, culture centres, the Apolo Club, the Condal Theatre, art galleries and countless cultural amenities to enjoy to the full”.
This kind of offer is quite evident in Poble Sec, a neighbourhood very much associated with a long standing tradition of theatres and bars in downtown Barcelona.
Poble Sec is home to two of the most internationally renowned theatres: the Grec and the Mercat de les Flors. With the Ciutat del Teatre, they are milestones in the construction of the image of Barcelona in Europe and the world. However, they are not widely used by the local population since they put on performances that attract a different social class. But the other theatres –Condal, Victòria and Apolo- have a long tradition in the neighbourhood and they are very popular.
Summing up, most of the interviewed autochthonous population considers that the proliferation of shops managed by the immigrant population is an element that interferes with the social cohesion of the neighbourhood and that may blur the identity of Poble Sec: “Before there was a little commerce that doesn’t exist now, there are only Pakistani shops. This does not give you cohesion with the neighbourhood” (Discussion group with autochthonous neighbours).
Nevertheless, some interviewed immigrant businessmen and owners of small shops admit there are conflicts around the use of public space but they point in their testimonies to the fact that coexistence is affected rather by an intensive use, for example, of Blai St., in terms of the uses of time and of intergenerational relations, than by cultural differences: “It is necessary to have more associations, association of neighbours, association of shop owners, association of neighbourhoods (...) for them to get together and study how they can fix the problems of the neighbours (...) the terms for living together, because if one is sleeping and has to go to work and the other maybe (...)they begin to throw things from the bottom upwards” (Pakistani man, member of the Poble Sec Traders Association).
International Migration and the Use(s) of Public Spaces
“In the ideal public space the conflict is continuous”
David Harvey
El País, September 8th, 2007.
Conflicts around the public space exceed the immigration question and already existed before present immigrants arrived. However, with the increase of the presence of immigrants in the cities, urban conflicts have come to be considered as problems caused by immigration. In this context, the term coexistence has become a keyword when discussing the matters of immigration and the use of public space. Therefore, it is dangerously likely for coexistence problems to be reduced to the relations between the autochthonous and the immigrant population or between different collectives of immigrants, thus naturalising their equivalence, as if they were synonyms. For this reason, it is necessary to be aware of the epistemological and political implications of using certain terms and of approaching the coexistence issue from an integral perspective in order not to reduce this matter to the “intercultural conflict” (Aramburu Otazu, 2009). That is why we find it is important to bring up here some considerations on this concept. For Marc Abèlés (2008, 111), the universe of coexistence belongs to a political tradition which is centred in the synchronic harmony of beings who move inside the reassuring universe of the city or who, at least, orient their actions having that horizon in mind, even when they are torn apart by permanent conflicts. In general, security is thought from the optics of coexistence. The State is hence accused for its incapacity to guarantee the harmonic cohabitation between the different population groups that live in the urban peripheries. Tensions confronting “autochthonous” with “immigrants” are brought to light, encouraging a radicalisation of discourses that demand a stronger repression of real or supposed prejudices in favour of the civic order. In the present context, considering the growing precariousness and incertitude regarding the future and the incapacity of the State to guarantee the security in this direction, it is more pertinent to speak of survival than of coexistence.
In the testimonies of our interviewees, the “cultural” matter and the difficulties to understand and communicate with those defined as different are emphasised when talking about conflicts referred to as “coexistence problems”. The weight of conflictivity thus fall mainly on the extra-communitarian immigrant population, though not in the same degree on all nationalities present in the neighbourhood. Nevertheless, our fieldwork has revealed a competition and differentiation in the use of the main public spaces of the neighbourhood which are determined by other factors.
In this sense, the articulation of the following variables: gender, age, nationality, social class, family situation, legal status, working conditions and religious practice (only to mention those that come up more frequently) seems to condition the uses given to the public space. This perspective allows us to add complexity to the simplistic dichotomy autochthonous/immigrants and to show the differentiation, hierarchy and inequality regarding the access to public spaces within each of these to big groups, often conceived as homogenous realities. Here are some of many examples: the invisibility of Pakistani women and the hipervisibility of Dominican women; the consumption of alcohol in the park by young nationals and immigrants, even Muslims in some cases; the presence of boys and girls of different origins playing together on the street and the lack of interrelation of many elderly Spanish people who have lived there all their lives with the neighbours from other countries; the different degrees of attendance to the mosque of the interviewed Pakistanis; the different strategies in the use of the health service between Moroccan and Pakistani women, all of them Muslim; the diverse manners and times for being on the streets of elderly and young Spanish people; the varied ways of circulating and living in the neighbourhood of a young Argentinean woman and of a young Ecuadorian woman, both of them immigrant, which also reflects different life and migration projects or, which is the same, different ways of being in the world.
Uses of the Public Space in Poble Sec: Conflicts Regarding Coexistence
In the 1980s and 1990s, Poble Sec underwent a process of ageing of the population and of abandonment of trading activities. Since 2000, immigrant population of different origins began to arrive, mainly Dominicans, Pakistanis, Filipino and Chinese, and they revived the trading activity. The local government’s initiative to make Blai St. pedestrian encouraged trade in the shape of businesses managed by the migrant population. The use of the studied public spaces is not free from problems and, in the words of the neighbours, there are coexistence problems. According to the first outcomes of the research, the conflictivity in the use of the busiest public spaces is determined by factors such as social class, xenophobic and racist feelings, age and gender.
The category of nationality enables the exploration of who is conceived as immigrant, whether this is a question of geographic movements (interstate or international) or whether the condition of being an immigrant is connected to coming from certain countries and of lacking public renown
At least in the Spanish context, nobody speaks of extra-communitarian football players as immigrants, regardless of what country they come from. In stead, they are referred to as foreign players. It does not seem likely either that someone may consider the Peruvian writer Vargas Llosa as an immigrant (especially not himself).
. As previous researches in other neighbourhoods of Barcelona (Aramburu Otazu, 2002) have proven, people who arrived as part of the intrastate migration of the 1950s and 1960s define themselves as a decent working class compared to the recently-arrived extra-communitarian immigrant population, which they consider a very low, marginal and culturally primitive social class. In line with this, the self-defined autochthonous population sees itself as an homogenous collective, with a “common national culture” that makes them different from the immigrant population, also conceived as an homogenous group: “I was born here in the neighbourhood. Before we used to all know each other; now, we know nobody. Many people have left the neighbourhood and migrants have come. The fact is that they don’t have the same customs, they practice other things, they don’t want to adapt themselves, we have to adapt to them. The customs are totally different and the contrast is very strong: the Caribbean and Pakistan, there is no medium”(Informal conversation with autochthonous neighbours on Blai St. Participant observation February 3rd, 2009, 1.30 pm).
The idea of the excessive use of the public space by the immigrant population transfers to the arguments on the “overcrowding” of the houses where they live. This discourse that links immigration to the degradation of the public and private space has been building the social figure of the immigrant for over a decade
“Communitarian immigration is a social phenomenon, in the strong sens of the term ‘social’, which means a phenomenon that we build collectively” (Ibáñez 2002). “...social figures, as non-communitarian immigration in our case, are not something that is given once and for all, neither are they the expression of a certain social essence, but they are always the product of a series of socio-economic processes that build them as such” (Santamaría, 1997, 48).
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“This neighbourhood began to receive Caribbean migrants, and this people have different customs. And we are the kind of people who work and the cost of living has been raised by them, because in one flat there can be 10, 12, 14, 17 people living, it’s all the same for them. They have risen the prices” (Informal conversation with autochthonous neighbours on Blai St. Participant observation February 3rd, 2009, 1.30 pm).
The fact that many people live in the same house is interpreted more as a matter of custom, determined by the culture of origin, that as the product of socio-economic inequalities, the high cost of housing, discrimination and racism (of real estate agencies and of property owners) that are suffered by most immigrants at the moment of renting a place to live
The issue of the “housing overcrowding of the immigrant population” was the argument posed by the government of the municipality of Vic, in Catalonia, to start discussing the need to regularise the registration (empadronamiento) of immigrant population at the Ayuntamientos, which then became a matter of political debate at state level in recent months. Completing the registration is essential in order to access health care and to continue the process of regularization trough settlement which require to have a formal job offer and to prove social (and even emotional) bounds with the host society. In that sense arraigo means to be rooted, to became rooted, to take roots, to settle...
. The migration project and the transnational organisation of migrant families are also important factors that affect the forms of inhabitation of a house. From this perspective, the sharing or subleasing of a property by several people can be interpreted as a strategy to achieve the migration goals, that in most cases –as revealed by our interviews and previous researches- are connected to paying off financial debts in the country of origin and/or debts resulting from the migration, to sustaining spouses, children, parents and/or siblings, to improving or buying a house in the country of origin, to reunificating the family, to setting up a business.
Besides this, the precarious residential conditions under which a high percentage of the immigrant population lives, has led to an intensive use of public spaces that some authors have denominated “compensatory agglomeration” (Martínez, 1997), which leads to conflicts and confrontations regarding what is considered to be an inadequate use of the public space: “Dominicans... let’s see, I understand that their lifestyle is different to ours, they are people who live like we used to live 50 years ago, they live in the streets with reaggeton (...) It’s the Caribbean, it’s the way they are, I understand, they speak yelling, so this summer that has been so hot, having everything open, you have them inside your house” (Discussion group with autochthonous neighbours, October 15th, 2009, 9:00 pm).
In some cases, things are presented differently amongst the autochthonous population. The written description of Manel, vicepresident of the Poble Sec Traders Association, portrays the Poble Sec of the 1980s, prior to the arrival of the non-communitarian immigration, as a neighbourhood of scarce cleanliness, with garbage on the streets, dog excrement on the parks, noise of families and some drug addicts. “My neighbourhood... uff! Let’s start with nostalgia. Those wonderful years (the 1980s) when we could play on the streets. Those wonderful really dirty streets, with the garbage bags by the doors (people with little civility have always existed), dirty because they would come to clean them once a week, with the cars parked on both sidewalks, mounted on top of them so much that you could hardly go out your front door; the balconies full of hanging clothes that went from one floor to the other, the old and neglected facades of the buildings. And my parks? How wonderful were those parks with all of the above plus the loose (undomesticated) dogs, their residues all over the place with no one to pick them up. But one thing is true, there was a lot of life in them. We were all there, dads, moms, children, dogs and junkiesssss. But of course, since the junkies were the sons and daughters of the neighbours, everything was cool with them, they did nothing here. Of course, they would go to rob and steal in other neighbourhoods. Everything was not so terrible, but it wasn’t Alice in Wonderland either”.
As regards the forms of resolution of the conflicts understood as coexistence problems, two stances can be identified:
One that supports the intervention of the public administration in the management of conflicts. This position is based on the idea that conflicts derived from “intercultural encounter” both in public and private spaces are a field for the intervention of the Ayuntamiento, which they blame for having caused the situation “that the neighbourhood has reached”. It is a stance that is present in many elderly neighbours and in the Ayuntamiento itself, which has developed plans to make coexistence easier. In other words, from this perspective, social cohesion is something that can be activated from the top downwards through the implementation of proper policies.
Another stance insists rather on the management of conflicts by the neighbours themselves through their everyday practices on the streets, in the buildings where they live, in the different kinds of associations. The civilising pedagogy between old and new neighbours plays a crucial part here.
The president of the Traders Association starts by calling the attention to his immigrant origin. His parents arrived from the south of Spain in the 1950s. He acknowledges the coexistence problems that appear around some public spaces. For him, the solution lies in teaching the newcomers the rules of urbanity and civility. A very habitual proposal in public discourse, which in some way resembles the idea of civilising the barbarians of the colonies, who now come in the form of post-colonial immigrants. Some NGOs and associations have come together in this attempt to tone down the conflicts: the Poble Sec Traders Association, the Poble Sec Coordinator of Entities with the Platform Poble Sec per a Tothom and Bona Voluntat en Acció.
Different Uses and Conceptions of the Public Space
Our fieldwork has shown that there is a competition for the use of public spaces that is marked by intergenerational relations, regardless of the national origin, which serves as ground for explaining convergences, understandings and confrontations, mainly in terms of territory appropriation. Our observations indicate that the intensive and expansive use of pedestrian Blai St. after 5 pm generates a conflict between boys, girls and teenagers (mainly male and of Dominican origin) and the elderly neighbours that have lived there their whole lives and who walk their dogs at the same time. In some accounts, these problems connected to the dispute over the same space by the different generations that inhabit the neighbourhood are interpreted from a culturalist perspective, reformulating them as problems of cultural difference and distance.
The contrast between the views expressed in the interviews with Spanish neighbours and those manifested by most of the immigrants from different nationalities is suggestive. While for the first ones, the children playing in the streets are all immigrants who play amongst themselves, who do not relate with others and who do nothing but bother elderly people, the second ones point to the practices of boys, girls and youngsters from the neighbourhood as an example of understanding and relation between nationals and foreigners. “On Blai St., children play a lot because they don’t have anywhere else to play (...) because there is no park in the neighbourhood or nearby where they can go and play. So everyday after they finish school, you can see the children playing here. And they all play together, those from here with those from other countries, all together without problem” (Venezuelan woman, owns a clothing shop on Blai St.). School (both public and semi-public) also appears in some interviews as the place where the little ones relate naturally with peers from anywhere in the world.
The use of the public space is also affected by gender relations. There is an invisibilisation of Pakistani women and a minority presence of Moroccan women carrying out tasks connected to the field of social reproduction: walking with their children and shopping for groceries. In the words of Isham: “[Moroccan women] get together in parks, get together at parties, I mean baptisms, small parties at their houses. For a baptism, for example, they invite everybody and they get together” (Moroccan woman, works in the Poble Sec office of ATIMCA, Association of Moroccan Immigrant Workers of Catalonia).
Opposed to this, there is the hiper-visibilisation of Dominican women –around hairdressing salons, chatting and well dressed- who escape the roles assigned to migrant women: carers for their own and others’ children and elderly people and responsible for guaranteeing the emotional stability of the husband and the migrant family. The fact that these immigrant women make the hairdresser’s a place of social gathering generates a certain discomfort in some of our female interviewees, especially amongst Catalan women of older age. According to an immigrant shop owner, autochthonous neighbours really disapprove of this use: “[They use the hairdressing salons] for everyone to get together there, as a meeting room, while they are doing people’s hairs and everything, and the people from here don’t like that. They say they should have the entrance clear, open, the shop calm and in order, but no, they all gather there as if it were their home’s backyard” (Venezuelan woman, shop owner on Blai St.).
Just as these testimonies put words to stereotyped views, it also needs to be said that in some interviews, people original from the same country –from Dominican Republic, for example- emphasise their regional identifications and their belonging to a social class in origin and in destination in order to differentiate themselves from the rest of their compatriots. Therefore, there are images that can also be used by migrant shop owners to distinguish themselves from those other nationals of their country who have come to rob, who do not adapt to the new context, who do not work, and thus the idea of the “good immigrant” (who works, adapts himself, respects...) is internalised and opposed to the “bad immigrant”. In the words of Manuel: “What I tell Dominicans is: ‘Hey, when we arrived, Spain was already made as it is. These people have had their way of living for 2000 years. Either you adapt to them or you leave’” (Dominican man has been living in Spain for 10 years).
We have also observed in the discourses of some immigrants the attribution to a whole national group of certain practices that are seen as negative which concern others’ ways of doing and being in the neighbourhood, and especially the ways of female neighbours of other nationalities. This criticism is oriented in many cases towards their gender relations, the upbringing of their children, their working habits, their relation with people around them and their way of circulating, using and controlling the public space.
Gender is a variable that conditions the forms of circulating the neighbourhood. Different interviewees agreed in pointing out that, in general, women are seen more during the day: in social services, courses, doctors’ offices, school doors, neighbourhood parties, and very often with their boys and girls. Male presence is dominant in certain bars, in parks, in corners and mainly at night.
Religious practice also emerges in some testimonies as a factor that conditions the forms of inhabiting and moving around the neighbourhood. The immigrants of Latin American origin have a higher presence in the activities of the Catholic church, whether they are attending mass or receiving legal, food or labour assistance. A Pakistani interviewee commented that he avoids passing in front of the church because he fears his presence can be considered an intrusion. Another one told us that he goes to pray at an oratory there is in the neighbourhood which he considers as a mosque but that for most neighbours –and for ourselves- goes unnoticed. However, one of the female interviewees complained of the inconvenience caused by the concentration of the faithful around that oratory because it interferes with the circulation on the sidewalk.
“Their prayers and their ceremonies and all... So you come from work at 2:00 to have lunch at home and you find the street full of people. Since they don’t have enough room inside, they are all outside barefoot putting their socks on, so you have to walk through feet and socks. Of course, I’ll go, get off the sidewalk and walk on the street where the cars pass, but I think: ‘An old lady, a person with a baby carriage, has to go through all of that’. So we have called, we’ve taken pictures, we’ve called the Catalan police (...) Well, that keeps working all the same. I think it’s fine for these people to need a space, but the Ayuntamiento is not helping at all” (Group conversation with autochthonous neighbours of Poble Sec, elderly people).
As De la Haba and Santamaría point out, the public space “is a socially determined space and, as such, it is asymmetrical and hierarchysised in terms of knowledge, accessibility, mobility, appropriation. The use and control of the space is, hence, a thoroughly stratified social attribute. Individuals and groups do not have an equal access to presence or localisation, and, consequently, they express in their uses and representations their differential capacities for the appropriation and codification of the urban space” (2004:128).
Changes in the population that inhabits and moves around Poble Sec are not only linked to the ageing of the “old migration” of the 1950s and 1960s and to the growth of the “new migration” since the beginnings of the year 2000. The mediatic and political construction of Barcelona as a city with a broad and rich cultural offer has made it a centre of attraction for foreigners, who are not thought of as migrants from the dominant visions and divisions (Bourdieu, 1999). This is the case, for example, of young people from Italy and Germany, but also of members of the white impoverished middle classes of Buenos Aires or Montevideo. Young Catalans have also been moving to the neighbourhood attracted by the prices of properties and rent, a little below the average of other areas in the centre of Barcelona. However, the presence of this population scarcely appears in the interviews, and when it does, it is in none of the cases seen as a problem. In reference to the profile of users of the neighbourhood’s library, the librarian clerk told us: “I think 40 % percent of the people is from abroad. There is a lot of immigrant people (...) many Europeans have also come here. I hadn’t told you this. Americans, French, Italians, there is a lot of people with studies who come and settle in Poble Sec. They also come looking for things. We have novels in all these languages and they come” (Catalan woman, 26 years old, clerk at the library of Poble Sec).
In our fieldwork, we interviewed some young national and foreign people who belong to this particular group of neighbours. Unlike traditional inhabitants of Poble Sec, who consider the increase in the number of shops and immigrant neighbours as a source of conflict and degradation, these new residents appreciate the diversity of origins of people from the neighbourhood and the multiplicity of shops and bars as positive factors, which they see as and added value since they are signs of multiculturalism. In some cases, that has even been the main reason why they chose to live in that area of Barcelona
In this regard, we talked in a Moroccans’ bar in Pamplona to a young Newyorker of Cuban origin and to a young Basque girl who had lived in Poble Sec for 9 years, where they used to frequent the Hibrid, a bar on Blai St. that has a clientele of “alternative” Spanish, Catalan and foreign young people, and what they appreciated the most was the possibility of having parties at any time, without having their “latin” neighbours complaining, but celebrating in stead.
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This is also one of the aspects that the local government is interested in commercialising. In the words of one of the representatives from the Ayuntamiento: “Because another very interesting thing that is emerging now in Poble Sec is that there is a whole group of people –this is what appeared in the media- that is making like an American Soho... there are some ateliers too... this means that it is also attracting a type of people that will come to a neighbourhood with a tradition, with a personality... which is creating... another potentiality... and it is another... meaning there are people related to the creation and who are settling there too” (Representative of the Poble Sec, Ayuntamiento of Barcelona).
Nina Glick Schiller (2008) states that both in the cities that manage to reinvent themselves constantly and in those others that desperately struggle against the post-industrial deterioration of their neighbourhoods and try to revitalise the value of their real estates, immigrants can be a transformation factor by acting as agents of gentrification. However, in our case study, the autochthonous population does not acknowledge the commercial revitalisation led by immigrant businessmen and shop owners. The “Poble Sec brand” is seen as the product of the progressive arrival of an artistic, bohemian, highly educated middle and upper-middle class that would be revaluing the social status of the neighbourhood. The text of an e-mail sent to us by Manel, vicepresident of the Poble Sec Traders Association, is eloquent on this regard: “...The parks, what’s the matter with the parks? Who are all those really dark people, with those clothes and those hairstyles? Damn, they are immigrants. Well, yes, and there are all kinds of them, good, bad, hard-working, lazy, educated and uneducated. The great majority can integrate alone, a part needs help and some of them just won’t integrate, but their children will. It takes time. There will always be problems to be solved, it’s Barcelona. Conclusion, I like my neighbourhood a lot more now than I did before. The change has been noticeable for good. There are more and more people from all of the arts, from all over the world, young people with their careers and learned, with whom you can have a good conversation at the neighbourhood’s shops. There are stores... Little shops that have been here forever are serving the new customers as if they had been born here. We also have the stores of the new Catalans, that seem to have realised that not everything can be done, and that the future is in opening up and selling to all of us, to them and to us, little by little.
P.S.: I hope this is useful for you. I am the 5th generation born in the neighbourhood and the 4 generations that are alive today are very proud of living in a VERY DECENT NEIGHBOURHOOD”.
Perceptions on Security/Insecurity in the Public Space
The extension of existence precarisation and the feeling of insecurity or lack of protection are part of a precise historic turn. In order to place in a historic context the proliferation of discourses around security/insecurity, it is necessary not to lose sight of the deregularising effects of mundialisation, of the transformations operated on the accumulation model and on the forms of organisation of labour and of the restructuring of the national state implemented in the beginnings of the 1970s, which has propelled a process of disaffiliation, decollectivisation, individuation and the growth of a generalised feeling of insecurity. These mutations define the transition towards a society characterised by precariousness, by an increase in the inequalities, a rise of violence and, correlatively, a rise of repressive mechanisms that target certain population groups. While public security mechanisms tend to be reinforced, a pronounced weakening of the systems of social protection can be observed (Abélès 2008, Balibar 2004, Castel 1997). The insecurity syndrome, at first linked to matters of public order, has become a leitmotiv in modern societies.
In Spain, the hegemonic discourse, widely present in the mediatic and political fields, also connects migration to insecurity in the public space. This securitarian view of migrations establishes the basic equation more immigrants = more crime. Many of the claims that arise in different neighbourhoods of Barcelona are articulated around this kind of conception, whether they address the (real or imaginary) presence of sexual workers or of dealers of illegalised drugs. The problem of drugs and prostitution also appears in some of our interviews:
“Many mothers here are now worried about drugs. They don’t know what else to do because the youngsters are getting a lot into that and the young girls don’t want to go to school anymore, but in stead they want to just wander around and many of them are going into prostitution. We haven’t seen it, but we have been told and the person who told us that is a trustworthy person. And the thing is that mothers bring their children here but they work all day and they don’t know what their children do or where they are. (Venezuelan woman, owner of a clothing shop on Blai St.).
Since we began our fieldwork, we heard testimonies on the conflicts regarding the use of public spaces, on the problem of immigration –at first connected to loud noises late at night- and on the intensive use of the space by young people. In the last year, the references to a conflict that was about to burst where constant and the discourse on insecurity was starting to emerge.
In January 2010, as a result of an event on Blai St., the media echoed the coexistence problems in Poble Sec. A headline raised the alarm: “Blood on Blai Street – Fight between Pakistanis and Dominicans”. In one of our periodical interviews with members of the Traders Association and other people who work on Blai St., we found out that the incident that had taken place a few days before had consisted of a drunken Dominican person who had hit himself and self-inflicted injuries in the corner of a locutorio owned by Pakistanis, and they were the ones who came out to assist him and called the ambulance.
The outburst generated different responses from different fields. One was the institutional response: the Coexistence Committee eliminated an initiative of the neighbourhoods’ associations, the Security Committee, where there was an attempt to claim for a stronger police presence in the neighbourhood. The Ayuntamiento considers that the security issue has to be left out of the conformation of the Coexistence Committee. The opinions in the neighbourhood are divided. The Plataforma Poble Sec Per a Tothom and the Traders Association, on the one hand, try to tone down the view that attributes conflicts exclusively to immigrant presence. Opposed to this is the Neighbours Association, which has set off the alarm and has begun to import slogans from other neighbourhood where also any conflict that takes place in the public space is considered a result of the presence of immigrant population. In this sense, a suggestive subject regarding the social conflicts generated in the use of the public space refers to the transfer of a symbolic border, the limit with El Raval, one of the neighbourhoods of the centre of Barcelona where the settling of immigrants dates from further back. One of the headlines of a Catalonian newspaper announced that a Coexistence Committee had been created because “they fear a ‘contagion’ of El Raval”, and it warned of the danger posed by “communicating vessels with El Raval”: “When El Raval sneezes, Poble Sec coughs”(Autochthonous neighbour, has been living in the neighbourhood for 37 years).
Another emerging topic of the media discourse refers to the dignity of the neighbourhood. Moralist, moralising and classist discourses are opposed to discourses that tone down the class differences and that sustain that these are isolated events and that “we already live in a neighbourhood with dignity”, as in the case of the Coordinator of Entities of Poble Sec.
But different conceptions appear in our interviews regarding security, as well as diverse forms in which public space, security/insecurity and migration are articulated. An articulation that is also affected by gender relations in origin and destination, by age, by the particular life trajectories, by the legal status and by the dominant visions and divisions.
One of the conceptions is connected to the freedom/restriction to move around the neighbourhood in certain areas and/or at certain hours. This is a matter that generally appears in the interviews with women. The interviewed Latin American immigrants feel a lot safer in the city of Barcelona and in Poble Sec than in their cities or country of origin or in their previous migration. They define the neighbourhood as a safe neighbourhood and they feel no fear to walk around or to use any public space (bars, streets, corners, restaurants, cafes, discotheques). Men also identify a higher security in the streets for women than in their countries of origin.
“No, I think that it is safer here. Because over there I’m not going to walk around like this, or with this rings or anything. If I went downtown, I had to take everything off and go without a handbag or anything. But here I leave the house, I take the bus and that’s it. At night it’s the same way. I haven’t had a fright since I’ve been here” (Ecuadorian woman, 24 years old, works at a bar on Blai St.).
“No, the truth is that I see Poble Sec as a very peaceful place. People here do their things, they may sell some marijuana, etc., but I’ve never seen a fight in Poble Sec. It’s very quiet” (Natalia, Uruguayan woman, grew up in Buenos Aires, 29 years old, has been living in Poble Sec for a year).
“...here you may walk by any street at 4 am and you’re not afraid of anybody. Even if you are a girl, you may walk anywhere. Over there it’s not like that. At 12 I go out of town and it’s a problem” (Pakistani man, 29 years old, currently unemployed.)
However, the perception of the security of the neighbourhood is very different in the case of elderly Catalan people. Very much in tune with the image given by the media, they feel it is not safe to walk around the neighbourhood at night:
“I don’t like the neighbourhood at night, nor here, not in the Paralelo. The night is very insecure. I don’t know what happens. Sometimes you see one of those guards passing by, but nothing happens, there is insecurity, and to have someone push you to steal something, one is no longer in the age for that. Some four years ago an elderly person was killed because they pulled it from her and she fell badly on the floor... Older people do not leave their houses” (Catalan woman, 70 years old, has lived in the neighbourhood all her life).
Other topics that appear in connection to the sensations of security or insecurity are: the legal status (the lack of documents generates a high degree of insecurity in everyday life, especially in the use of public spaces); the job (labour insecurity in the countries of origin was, in most cases, the reason for migration, and on this regard, some interviewees feel safer in Spain regarding their futures); the lack of trust in the institutions of the country of origin and the insecurity that it generates in terms of the economic future and their savings (the paradigmatic case of the Argentinean crisis of 2001 and the corralito); insecurity regarding old age in the countries of origin when they do not have a retirement pension (and in some cases the migration projects also appear as a reassurance against that uncertain future).
But this image of the place of emigration as safer as the place of origin may be already changing, as a consequence of the impact that economic crisis is having on the labour conditions of the immigrant population. The testimonies of the immigrant population as well as those of the key informants who work in social services point to the economic insecurity generated by the crisis and the recession in Spain. Both Moroccan woman, who provides information services at ATIMCA, and the representatives of the Plataforma Per a Tothom confirm that the economic crisis has led to an increased visibilisation of men requiring information at the assistance for users. They say that, since the crisis started, the Xarxa d’Inserció Poble Sec (Comissió Sociolaboral), one of the strategic areas of the Pla Comunitari, began to see a higher presence of men asking for information on the possibility to find a job. Until then, the users were mostly women.
Neighbourhood Social Services as Social Spaces
In this point, we focus on the usage that immigrant people do of three specific services: the library, the civic centre and the health care services. For that purpose, we base ourselves on the interviews held with people linked to the functioning of these services (librarian, doctor, technicians of the Ayuntamiento) and on the interviews with neighbours.
The opinion of most interviewees is that the immigrant population makes scarce use of the services, mainly of the library, and that, in general, women make more use of them than men.
“In the Civic Centre there are more women because I think that women participate more than men, they attend more courses, so you can always see that there is a bigger movement of women. But this is not so in the other places. In the neighbourhood parties you see women and children, but in the bars you see more men” (Uruguayan woman, 28 years old, 26/02/2009).
“The sensation that it is women who frequent the Health Centre more is that that’s how it is. I would say yes. (...) No, in general women (whether autochthonous or foreign) must be the ones who worry the most. Many times... not many times, but sometimes, the husband is forced to come: ‘OK, I’ll come or otherwise she won’t shut up’. Yes, women rather than men are the users. There are exceptions but, in general, yes” (Catalan man, family doctor at the Primary Health Care Centre Les Hortes).
In the accounts of immigrants, the reason for the scarce participation is the lack of time, having working hours that leave little room for other kinds of activities. Opposed to this explanation, some workers of the social services point to the lack of information, interest or habit. However, amongst the interviewees who consider themselves autochthonous, social or political participation in the neighbourhood does not seem to be the rule, but rather the exception.
Another explanation given by some interviewees when talking about the scarce prevention of some groups of immigrants in health matters is the cultural difference.
Through the discourses on the participation in these public spaces, certain images concerning gender also emerge: gender relations and the production and reproduction tasks that condition the ways in which social agents, many of whom are women, conceive the world. When speaking of immigrants, especially Muslim, the higher female presence in social services is thought of, on one sense, as a sort of continuation of family care tasks, socially assigned to women (Agrela 2009). But since, in reality, those tasks are still not considered as work, many of the interviewed women refer to a larger time availability. To say it simply: women go more because, since they do not work, they have more time.
“They had more free time. If they wanted legal advise, the women were the ones who came, even if it was their husbands who wanted to renew the papers. ‘They can’t come so I come’. For housing, if they were looking for an apartment, it was the woman who came. Maybe she was the one with more spare time. Now we do spot more men for labour matters. For labour, yes. (Moroccan woman, works at ATIMCA, Association of Moroccan Immigrant Workers of Catalonia).
Besides paying no attention to the time required by reproduction tasks and the activities that they carry out not only for themselves but for the rest of the members of the domestic unit (related to legal or labour matters, to food provision...), these views overlook an important fact: social services, as well as all kinds of associations and even churches, tend to plan a lot of interventions aimed at women, since they are considered to be more vulnerable, in greater need, passive, submissive, and because they are worked with thinking of their role as responsible for family welfare and, in the case of the immigrant population, as bridges between the culture of origin and the culture of destination. As one of the association workers admits, for good and for bad, working with the women is working with the family: “It’s my point of view of the work we are carrying out so far, because we work with the family. When I say ‘department of women’, you are working with a family” (Moroccan woman, works at ATIMCA).
Regarding the use of the library, the interviewed librarian comments that around 40% of users are foreigners, although she is referring to a very specific profile of library users: to a great extent, elderly (to read the news paper) and young. She differentiates also some national groups that visit it less –Dominicans- and others that use the service more, such as Europeans: “Dominicans, the adult population, hardly come at all. It’s rather some children, and they come and say things that you realise they are never going to use the library, and they say: ‘excuse me, can I come in to look for my grandson’, and you say, ‘Madam, of course! It’s a public space’. You can see that they never come” (Catalan woman, 26 years old, works at the library of Poble Sec).
And here we find a good example of how the same attitude can be conceived in a totally opposite way. For the librarian, the case of the Dominican grandmother is an indicator of how she hardly ever goes to the library. If she went more often, she would know how to conduct herself in that space. For the Dominican grandmother probably it is a question of respect and civility, since it is not right to enter a public or private place without saying hello and asking for permission. In this sense, we can think of the endless comments that all of us have sometime heard from Latin American immigrants about how “bad-mannered” Spanish people (from different places) are, because of some behaviours that appear as of little civility in their eyes. Amongst the complaints, one can usually find the fact that they do not say hello or goodbye, they do not ask for things with “please”, they do not ask for permission, they do not thank.
Spanish lessons, besides the learning of the language, are seen as meeting places, an conception that is very present in the testimonies of the interviewed people. However, those who only attend the classes (mostly women) and do not participate in other activities, are defined as “closed”, as lacking interest in relating with the rest of the participants. And the cultural difference appears here again to explain these varied ways of using the space, and so appears a new scale of similarities and differences, which in this case places Moroccan women closer to Catalan women, since both are Mediterranean and different from the Pakistanis: “What I perceive is that Pakistanis have more trouble learning and they interfere with the class. Moroccans are very disciplined. They come to class and they come to study. And they want to take lessons (...) Pakistanis come here as to a rather social place. They come here to socialise. And then sometimes they are seen with disapproval by Moroccans. When they organise outings Moroccans don’t come. (...) They have their recreation space elsewhere. They come here to learn” (Catalan woman, Spanish teacher at the NGO La Formiga).
Both amongst the immigrant and the national population some complaints have been expressed regarding the functioning of public health services, which are repeated all through the State and that reflect the impact on health care of the conversion and restructuring process of the Spanish welfare State
In Spain, social services, health care and education, amongst others, are a competence of the Autonomical governments.
: “The thing is that the public health service is terrible, they treat you badly, they have you waiting there for hours, and the doctors are lousy, and to have one of those putting the speculum in you, just imagine (...) And many of those women have no money to go to a private place because all they have they send to their country, and that’s why they are working all the time and running from one place to the other and they all live one on top of one another. I have my private gynaecologist, a wonderful Colombian doctor. Of course, I have to pay 80 euros the consult, but I’d rather do that a thousand times than go to the doctor of the social security that is terrible” (Informal conversation with the women of the Sully Sport, Venezuelan, 14/01/2009).
In the interviews on the use of the Primary Health Care Centre, some important differences regarding gender, age and national and cultural origin also emerge. As we have already pointed out, it is women once again who use this service more. In some cases, as with Pakistani women, the doctor tells us that they always come accompanied by their husbands, and he also points to language as a key factor for the access to health care: “In general, in the case of Pakistani women, the one who asks questions is the husband and the one who talks, in general, is the husband. The Chinese are also like a world of their own, because they have... it’s a community that also has a lot of people and they have their methods and their traditional medicine, so they do a lot amongst themselves. They come occasionally for a specific consult, but only few of them come. What happens is that here the language is a major obstacle (...) Maybe Ecuadorian, Colombian, Dominican women come more... Yes, women are the ones who come for the most consults” (Catalan man, family doctor at the Primary Health Care Centre Les Hortes).
On the basis of his account, one can establish a typology for the use of the health care services amongst migrant women, which he connects to mentality, but that should also be considered in connection to life and working conditions of the migrant population, and to the time they have been living in Spain. Pakistanis go in more for emergency care while Argentineans and Chileans go in more to have periodic check-ups, for prevention.
“What Pakistanis don’t have is the prevention mentality. Sometimes you discover diabetes, hypertension, certain problems that require follow-up and taking a certain medicine, or they have to get some tests done; since that doesn’t suit them well and that is not the reason why they’ve come, sometimes they forget or they do not come for follow-up controls. They come a lot for the acute condition. They have a headache, well, ‘I want to be treated for the headache’; ‘I have a sore back’ or ‘I have a cough’. So they come for other parts and talking about other aspects is complicated (...) Argentineans and Chileans come a lot for check-ups. (...) (Catalan man, family doctor at the Primary Health Care Centre Les Hortes).
Then, in the same conversation, the doctor himself will speak of the long working hours of a great portion of the immigrant population and the rigidity of social services’ hours, that tend to be open during the day at working hours so it is almost impossible to go there without having to miss work. In short, the social services are scarcely adapted to the different needs of the neighbours.
“It depends on the availability. Many times we are speaking of people with precarious jobs, with complicated working hours, so in part that makes it difficult for them, and sometimes we also have quite rigid opening hours in this sense, right? And at the time they could come, we have already closed. If they work from 8 to 8, they can’t be assisted here. They’ll be assisted on Saturdays, when there is an urgency consult, and they will be badly assisted, because in the urgency consult there are things that can’t be done for time reasons and all” (Catalan man, family doctor at the Primary Health Care Centre Les Hortes).
This idea that we have tried to look into regarding whether the health centres and their practices became a meeting space, operates in this way for autochthonous inhabitants, but not so much for immigrants. Again, we see the emergence of the idea of time, availabilities and the conception of what is public: “That happens with people from here, with the autochthonous, especially during the summer, with all the heat, people come here to spend the afternoon” (Catalan man, family doctor at the Primary Health Care Centre Les Hortes).
Relationships between labour and public spaces
The economic restructuring and the transformations of the productive system which began in the late 1970s did not only modify the forms of organisation of salaried labour, but they also implied the advent of new relationships in other fields of social life. The development of the new production and communication technologies opened the way for the automatisation of the productive process and to industrial delocalisation. Both dynamics implied a progressive decrease in the need for workforce in industrialised countries and this was reflected on migration policies with the suspension of foreign workers hiring and with the launching of the process of closing the borders.
But the most devastating effect of questioning the centrality of the labour factor has not been so much the unemployment as the degradation of employment and of the salaried status; precarisation, though less spectacular, is the most defining feature. The destabilisation of the stable is the nucleus of the new social question (Castel 1997, Bauman 2000). The proliferation of temporary jobs, trash contracts, part-time workdays, employment subsidised by public funds and other forms of flexible labour should not be seen as an anomaly. It is an indicator of the degradation of the salary and it is immersed in the dynamics of the modernisation process, since it represents a mutation encouraged by the demands of capitalism’s development.
The social fracture no longer divides a majority of integrated from the inhabitants of the system’s peripheries, but it breaks the same heart of the labour market, where there is a minority labour aristocracy with safe employment, good salary and social benefits, and a majority of fragile subjects, who cultivate the culture of the random, as precariousness has become their destiny. In tune with these transformations, post-fordist migrations have very different characteristics from the ones of the 1960s: (1) greater diversity of origins and growing feminisation of flows, in direct relation to the globalisation dynamics that connect more and more territories and countries every time; (2) intensification of migration in a context of restrictive policies that have had the effect of the irregularisation of certain population movements, and (3) migrations linked to the expansion of the labour demand of those sectors of the economy that are forced to keeping their labour costs low and connection between immigrant workers and flexible and precarious sub-employment in a context of labour and union deregularisation (Pedreño 2005). These are the features that characterise, in general, the migration flows that have arrived in Spain since the mid-1980s, against the background of that deregularisation of labour. This is also the global context in which the life and working conditions of the interviewed Poble Sec migrants are inserted.
A constant in all the interviews with the immigrant population is this link between migration and labour. That is: all the testimonies explain the migration project as a strategy to get a better job. This “better job” does not always imply better working conditions, but it does provide a higher income and it allows the migrant to improve the life conditions of relatives (children, spouses, parents) who live in the country of origin through the sending of remittances.
“I always say that the only good thing about here, because to me it is good, is that one has her job, her salary, and that’s it. That I have my job and that is the good thing. Over there it is very difficult to have a salary that pays enough to afford an apartment. On the contrary, here I have my salary, I have treated my self to some things I wanted to buy and I have the possibility of sending it to my daughter for her school and for the things she wants. That is the only thing I have found here” (Ecuadorian woman works at a bar in Poble Sec).
“Here it has been comfortable for that reason: I haven’t lacked work, we have a normal family, good health, that is noticeable too, a house in a quite normal neighbourhood... and work” (Norys, Dominican, owner of a hairdressing salon, has lived in Poble Sec for 15 years).
“I came only for work. Otherwise, I would have never left my country” (Pakistani man works on Blai St., lives in Poble Sec).
Many of our interviewees work and live in the neighbourhood, especially those who have their own shop: greengrocer’s, hairdresser’s, butcher’s, locutorio, restaurant. Others reside in other neighbourhoods of Barcelona or in the suburban areas and only work in Poble Sec, but due to the long working hours, they spend more time in Poble Sec than in their place of residence.
“I work from Monday to Sunday. Now this month that has started, February, I get up at 6 and I come to work until 8 at night. I’m here all day, I don’t go home at all. And on Saturdays I come at 2 pm. And the same on Sundays. And on Saturdays I get up at 10 am. While I have breakfast, I chat a little with my mom, then it’s noon, I shower and dress up and it is the time and I come here. Time flies and I finish at 8” (Ecuadorian woman works at a bar in Poble Sec).
In all cases, the workplace also operates as the space for interrelation with the neighbours, because most of them are employed in the service sector.
“For me, the neighbourhood is fine. On this street I know a lot of people, I almost know everybody here, the workers, the people from the shop (...) There are good people. It is easier because there are many foreigners. There are Dominicans, there are Chinese -but they came a short while ago-, there are others from Pakistan, Ecuadorians, also Bolivians” (Pakistani man1 works at a restaurant on Blai St., lives in Poble Sec).
“-But here I have more friends than there. Most of the people from there have died already.
-And are those friends rather from Bolivia too or they are also from here?
-Most of them are Spanish, but also Ecuadorian, Bolivian, a bit of everything. They are from all over because it’s the customers who are from all over” (Bolivian woman has lived in Poble Sec for 9 years, helps out her daughter at the greengrocer’s)
In terms of the labour trajectories in the migration, certain differences regarding gender can be established on the basis of the testimonies. Men tend to work or have worked in construction and in service (waiters, cooks, supermarket cashiers, employees at a locutorio). Throughout the years, some of them have managed to set up their own companies in both sectors. In the case of women, although none of the interviewees is currently working in it, for many of them (and/or for their mothers) domestic work has been the first job they have had in Spain, and generally this is the way through which they have obtained the regularisation. Other interviewees work as waiters, others are in charge of their own shops (clothing shops, hairdresser’s, greengrocer’s) and others work in cleaning services. An important proportion of them have been working in an irregular situation, especially those who arrived a longer time ago, when they still did not need a visa to enter as tourists.
“-[Her father] worked in construction without papers... Then he ran into people who wouldn’t pay him when the time came to pay. They took a lot of advantage of them. And of course, you had to work, you had to take the risk. If they are going to pay me, great, but if they won’t pay you, you don’t know.
- How did he get the papers? Could he have some company get them for him?
- Of course. He managed to get someone to make him a contract and have his papers done for him. If you were a woman, it was easier because you would go to a family house without papers and then they would make you a contract. It was that way for me. The same for my mother.”
“-And what was your first job when you got here?
-Construction.
-Construction. Here en Barcelona or elsewhere?
-Well, in Barcelona, where there was work. In the same company, but...
-And are you still in the same company or not?
-I only worked in one. No, now I’ve been self-employed for three years.” (Dominican man, lives in Poble Sec).
In the Spanish case, together with agriculture, all these sectors have been the most affected by the deregulation of labour, which was set in motion in the mid-1980s and deepened during the 1990s. This reflects, amongst on other things, on the long workdays and the few days off. But this over-exploitation can be found not only amongst migrants who are employed by others. Migrants who have their own small shops also find themselves forced to working all day, every day of the week in order to fulfil their migration project.
“Well, there’s no other way around it. Work at the greengrocer’s is the only thing I’ve got and if I close earlier, then you don’t make the same money as always and well... you can’t close early. But usually I stay until 10 pm. Now I think I’ll maybe close at 9:30 pm. (...) We open at 9:30 in the morning and we close at 10 at night. Everyday is the same.” (Bolivian woman has a greengrocer’s on Blai St., lives upstairs from her shop).
“-I see that you work here all day. At what time do you open?
-It opens at 11, 11:30, until 11 at night.
-And you work here every day?
-Almost every day.
-Don’t you have days off?
There are times when I also have a day off, but now my co-worker isn’t here, and that’s why I’m alone now.” (Pakistani man 1 works at a restaurant on Blai St., lives in Poble Sec)
Vital conditions imposed by a life dedicated to work shape the use given to public spaces. Probably that is why the interviewed migrants who work in the neighbourhood, whether they live there or not, do not frequent leisure places or experience that bohemian side advertised by the “Poble Sec brand”. Most of them go from their house to work and vice versa, and gatherings with friends tend to take place in other neighbourhoods or at their homes.
“-Do you just walk around Blai St. occasionally?
-No, no. I have that thing of coming directly here, and since I am with my mom, she has me from the house to the bar and from the bar to the house. And sometimes they ask me as a favour, since we live with my mother’s mother in law who has Alzheimer’s, and the day-care centre is nearby here, they ask me to drop her off there and then I come here. Sometimes I say from the house downtown and from downtown to the bar, and sometimes I don’t go downtown, so then it’s only the two places” (Ecuadorian woman works at a coffee shop on Poble Sec).
“-And do you do any activity in the neighbourhood? For example, do you go out shopping or decide to stay in the neighbourhood some weekend? Are you regular customers of any Dominican place?
-No.
-And do you get together here with any Dominican friends?
-Yes.
-And where do you get together?
-At our houses.
-You still keep that tradition of getting together at people’s houses.
-Yes. Then there’s also my sisters. There’s a sister with whom we are always together, and she has daughters and they get together.” (Dominican woman lives in Poble Sec, has a hairdresser’s).
Only two of the interviewed immigrants who live in Poble Sec but work in other neighbourhoods frequent places of leisure regularly, as socialising spaces. But their preferred places seem to be very differentiated, and so are their life projects, trajectories and migration profiles.
“In Poble Sec when we get together to have a drink with the people it is always on Blai St., or sometimes at a bar that is on Margarit St. In the Summer, we get together at the terrazas of Blai, or at Montjuïc, when they show films. Yes, we do go to Montjuïc quite a lot in the summer, but not in winter.” (Uruguayan woman lives in Poble Sec).
“I like to go to Montjuïc in the Winter to seat in the sun. I just seat there. In the summer, I like better the park that is there, at the end in Parallel. In the summer I sit there until 4 am. (...) we all get together there, and there are Spanish people two, girls, boys, everybody. The park is full of people in the summer all night long. We stay sitting there, talking (...) I get together with friends, we have a drink.
-And this street, Blai, is it rather a place to pass by or also to stay?
-No, I pass by here and I come here (Donner) and I have another friend here who has a call center and I also go by there.” (Pakistani man, cousin Pakistani man 1, they live in Poble Sec).
International Migration, Public Policy and Social Movements
Bommes and Geddes (2000) have explored how the decisional and organisational infrastructure of the different types of Welfare States affect the forms adopted by immigration management in each country. In Spain, the State’s turning away from certain areas previously under its responsibility promoted the growth of the non-profit sector. In time, a functional specialisation between the mercantile initiative, the public sector and the social initiative has crystallised. Companies concentrate in the sectors where there is a solvent demand, while NGOs become the producers of cheap services for a diversity of categories defined as high-risk, in collaboration with autonomical or municipal governments
In the Spanish context, the destiny of Non-Governmental Organisations has always been linked to the process of capitalist modernisation, being the State (in all its historic versions) the one that, through subsidies, agreements and contracts, has contributed to forming it as endemically dependant of the public sector. The re-conformation of the Third Sector coincided with the reactivation of the post-franquist social reform and with the structural crisis of the keynesian-fordist system. This was the context of the progressive mutation of social movements into service-providing organisations, with a higher implication in social public policies and with an important financial dependency, constitutive elements of the general process of restructuring of the Spanish Welfare State.
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In the beginnings of the 1990s, the Spanish public administration adopted a discourse that privileged the action of NGOs in the management of social matters, based on the understanding that they are more agile, they have a greater flexibility and capacity to adapt to changing demands, they know better and are closer to social problems, they use resources better and they encourage participation, solidarity and social cohesion. This model implies, on top of a deep interrelation between solidarity organisations and the administration, a division of functions amongst them. The non-governmental organisms are hence left in charge of the detection of problems and the management of the services, which must adjust to the programmes, budgets and controls established by the governmental entities.
Following this tradition, until the mid-1990s, social policies aimed at the immigrant population were displayed by the Non-Governmental Organisations (Giménez Romero 1995, Solana Ruiz 2002, Dietz 2000). Throughout the last decades, immigrant support groups related to the Church as well as to non-confessional organisms like neighbours associations, community organisations, sections of worker unions and immigrants associations have emerged as renown and competent counterparts (Dietz 2000). In the field of Spanish migration policies, the combination of the axes centralism/federalisation and statism/privatisation has given impulse to a third tendency: the gradual but evident movement from universalist and generalist approaches (normalisation) to particularist and multicultural measures (Agrela y Dietz 2005).
We have confirmed this three tendencies in previous researches (Gil Araujo forthcoming, Agrela 2006), and also in our fieldwork, where we saw and important labour carried out by immigrants, women and neighbours associations in the management of programmes promoted and funded by the municipal government. Also the Church covers an outstanding role in the assistance of the most vulnerable immigrant population in Poble Sec, especially the undocumented and unemployed, and also works in connection with the neighbourhood’s social services.
“We work quite a lot as a network, at the level of churches and with social services. We do not have any direct solutions either, but it is true that we have a good network of services and with other parishes in the centre of Barcelona we have quite a lot of information and coordination...” (Priest at the Poble Sec parrish).
This way, in the framework of a social assistance system that defends normalisation, mechanisms of differential assistance are implemented through the services provided by different types of Non-Governmental Organisations, to which a great portion of the immigrants tends to be referred, regardless of their legal status or the time they have been living in Spain.
“We work with all the collectives, but in the neighbourhood we are defined as for Moroccan collectives (...) They even need to make an appointment with the neighbourhood’s social worker, and then: ‘Moroccan, you need some help, then get out of here’; financial assistance (we do not process that here but we do provide information on where to go, how to do it, and we even help them with that), but if it is a Moroccan, they do not hesitate (...) but in the end we are the referent of an entity that works here in the neighbourhood but for the Moroccan collective” (Moroccan woman works at ATIMCA, Association of Moroccan Immigrant Workers of Catalonia).
The transfer to social organisations of the responsibility for the management of immigrant integration policies entails –besides a separation native vs. immigrants amongst the beneficiaries of social services- the privatisation of the Welfare State’s functions and the utilisation of precarious or non-remunerated work (volunteers) to offer services that, in the welfarist framework, should be guaranteed by public organisms. In parallel, the meaning of social rights becomes eroded. They are presented as helps of charitable nature which are conditioned by the arbitrariness of public administrations and organisations. Frequently, this system of aids relieves situations of fragility generated by the same foreigners law, due to the restrictions imposed regarding the access to the labour market and to other resources. This reinforces the idea that assistance to the immigrant population belongs in the field of assistencialism, in stead of being interpreted as a matter of access to rights.
“Every time you work with immigration, it is impossible not to go by the Church. Anywhere in the world. Especially in Latin America. They are referents for good, and bad and this is a referent for good” (President of the Traders Association of Poble Sec).
The services offered by these institutions are really diverse: legal assistance, language lessons, job searching, food assistance, family support, translation. Services that are provided by public social services to the great majority of Spanish citizens.
“When I arrived here [2002], there was a food bank service that was pretty exceeded in demand and with very little control, and there was a great number of Moroccan families that came to the food bank... (...) And when we began working a little with those Moroccan families with a little more rigour, it started to decrease quite a lot. Then we began working more with South American families, Ecuadorian, many at the time, and then started a period with families from Bolivia, Dominican Republic... They came rather for a social than for a religious reason, they came to relate with the parish, especially through children, but always for a social reason, searching for ways to get their papers... (Priest at the Poble Sec Parrish).
“We try to establish a contact between people that are looking for a job and those who are offering it, but it is difficult because it demands a dedication... But yes, if you know of people who are looking for a job in domestic service or to assist elderly people... (Priest at the Poble Sec parrish).
“In general, they come looking for something, they come for a service we are providing, they come for housing, for employment, for a lawyer, normally. Then, depending on the person and working with them, you discover they are lacking something, which takes time and they don’t speak the language well, so then you refer them to the department of women (...) we try to make an intervention, to raise awareness (...) to orient her a little (...) We may orient, inform and even do the follow-up, with people with whom we do a translation accompaniment, if they have an interview and don’t speak well, but that is up to a moment, meaning that we work on autonomy” (Moroccan woman works at ATMCA)
This last testimony mentions another important aspect and confirms some of what we mentioned before: women are the target of most activities of these organisations because they are considered to be in greater need of support. The purpose of these interventions is to promote their participation, emancipation, education, instruction, and to debate topics that should be of their interest. This insistence on encouraging the participation of immigrant women is something that one can hardly fully understand, considering that all the testimonies indicate that it is women, both national and immigrant, who participate more of the activities of these organisations.
“The purpose is for them to gain awareness of the fact that they are women and they can freely choose many things. Not only clean, cook and care for the house, but they can attend a course...” (Catalan woman, Spanish teacher at the NGO La Formiga).
This insistence in promoting the participation is connected to the hegemonic perception of integration as a matter of commitment and will. Somehow, this idealised participation would show the interest of the immigrant person on belonging to the society in which he or she lives. All of this in a context -it is good to remember this- where general participation of the citizens in public issues is progressively less and less. It is as if the immigrant population is always expected and demanded to overact , something that Sayad denominates an excess of politesse. A constant test of their loyalty towards the nation. Integration exams promoted in some communitarian countries follow this argumentative logic. Although in Spain these political technologies for the management of integration haven’t been implemented yet, some representatives of Convergencia i Unió have already expressed their support to this type of initiative. They insist on the argument that the access to nationality (Spanish, by the way) has nothing to do with the time of residence, but it is in stead a matter of commitment and will, and they propose that those who show a greater participation in the society of destination may access nationality in a shorter time (Gil Araujo et al 2009).
Discourses and Practices around Coexistence and “Integration” of the Migrant Population
As well as the ethnic diversity that made Poble Sec a very suitable place to carry out the investigation on the use of public space by local people and migrants, the variety and richness of the social movements –the other object of research of the Work Package– was also important when it came to choosing the borough to do the fieldwork. As we have already pointed out, at the beginning of the 20th century Poble Sec had a large working class, characterised by trade union militancy, and the Anarchist and Anticlerical movements. With the end of the dictatorship and the return to democracy, organisations of all kinds began to re-emerge in the borough: in 1973 the Residents Association was founded with broad representation of the political parties and aware social groups. At that time, the local residents began to make demands in an area where there were no green spaces and no urban improvements.
In 1989, in order to promote joint actions the Poble Sec Entities Coordination Committee was created and today the borough has a very active network of associations including about 80 entities and organisations gathered under this great federation (www.poblesec.org). Amongst them, we should mention at least four organisations that are working to improve the access to the labour market, social inclusion, more available training processes and smoother integration of people who have just arrived. They are:
The Plataforma Poble Sec Per a Tothom (Poble Sec for everyone): a social body that emerged inside the Poble Sec Entities Coordinating Committee to foster social inclusion in the borough and to encourage coexistence amongst the residents. To that end it promotes different cultural exchange activities (the “Cookery around the World” project, for example), and aspects related to social and work advice, legal advice, adult education (Spanish, Catalan or cooking courses), etc. The Platform concentrates its activities in three differentiated areas: children, adults and senior citizens. One of the main activities led jointly by the Platform and the Entities Coordinating Committee is the Community Plan, a joint strategy between entities and the public administration based on public participation to carry out an organisation and development process for the borough aimed at transforming and improving the reality of the community.
ATIMCA (Association of Moroccan immigrant workers in Catalonia): as its name suggests, it is an association of Moroccan workers and Moroccan immigrants. It is a non-profit organisation and since 1993 it has put its efforts into the full integration of Moroccan immigrants into Catalan society. Some of the fields where it concentrates its activities are legal advice, social services, health, education and culture.
La Formiga: this is a non-profit entity founded in the year 2000 which carries out activities against social or ethnic inequality and in favour of solidarity. It is working on a number of projects to foster intercultural coexistence and the social and work integration of immigrants through training, orientation, awareness-raising and activities that encourage relations between people of different origins.
Bona Voluntat en Acció: a social NGO which has been working since 2007 for the Fourth World, trying to eradicate poverty, marginalisation and social exclusion through integral personal assistance programmes and fostering the spirit of solidarity and volunteer work.
The Institutional View on Coexistence
In the institutional discourse, managing diversity after the arrival of immigrants translates into the issue of coexistence that emphasises much more the cultural differences than the socio-economic inequalities. At this point, intercultural mediators appear, as well as the organisation of language lessons (both of Catalan and Spanish) and the matter is expressed in municipal plans, mediation services and NGOs’ activities.
Some examples that we can mention are the Pla Municipal per a la Interculturalitat (1997), the Servei de Mediació Intercultural (which started on 2002) and the Pla Municipal per a la Immigració (2002). One of the principles of this last plan is the acknowledgement of cultural diversity understood as the acceptance of coexistence and of the active interchange between the different cultures present in the city, as long as it does not interfere with people’s fundamental rights. As for the policies to face immigration, the plan establishes the principles for normalisation
This document shows how the Ayuntamiento defines its own trajectory managing interculturality issues:
https://www.interculturalitat.cat/esl/Punto-de-partida/Antecedentes)
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Presently, the Pla de Treball per a la Immigració 2008-2011 is in force. It was approved in October 2008 and it echoes some measures from the Pla Municipal of 2002, based on three main pillars:
Guaranteeing equal rights and duties and social opportunities for people within the framework of a state of rights built on the principle that all are equal to the law.
Adapting municipal services in order to respond to the new socio-demographic reality avoiding the appearance of imbalances between offer and demand that cause tension and competition for the resources.
Acknowledging the cultural diversity emphasising the common aspects that join us, encouraging bonding and positive interaction of citizens on the basis of the cultural patrimony of the receiving society and on the grounds of the principle of interculturality.
Another tool is part of the Programa Barcelona Diàleg Intercultural, which is a result of the Any Europeu del Diàleg Intercultural (2008). “This programme has brought to light the great amount of social actors that work in Barcelona to promote intercultural dialogue as an instrument to make coexistence easier and to take advantage of the possibilities offered by diversity”. Since 2009, the Ayuntamiento has been giving impulse to the Pla Barcelona Interculturalitat. It defines interculturality as: “the diversity of origins, languages, customs, values and beliefs that has meant a noticeable increase in the socio-cultural diversity of Barcelona over the past few years, posing new complexities for coexistence and social cohesion”
https://www.interculturalitat.cat/esl/Punto-de-partida/Presentacion
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In respect to interculturality, the Pla de Treball per a la Imigració 2008-2011 arguments: “The idea of interculturality is based on the notion that contact is a primordial aspect for integration. Interculturality implies then the systematic and gradual promotion of spaces and processes of positive interaction that begin to generalise relations of trust, mutual acknowledgement, effective communication, dialogue and debate, learning and interchange, peaceful regulation of conflict, cooperation and coexistence. But intercultural relations take place in a certain environment and context. And, for this reason, the cultural patrimony and the language of the receiving society are the necessary basis on which interculturality can be worked on” (...) “Another fundamental field for a real process of integration to be produced is the one of a full participation of citizens. People of foreign origin residing in the city must have the chance to develop themselves as social and political agents”.
Some of these arguments express what we could denominate the Catalan philosophy of integration, which underlies in the hegemonic views of Catalan public officials, politicians, NGOs, scholars and policy makers. It has its roots in the problematisation of the interstate immigrant presence of the 1950s. In the beginnings of the 21st century it was institutionalized as the Catalan way for integration regarding the non-communitarian immigration. Following this path, the Citizenship and Immigration Plan 2005-2008 went a step forward by defining the policy of integration as a linguistic policy. A stance that was reinforced by the signing of the National Integration Pact in 2009 (Gil Araujo 2009)
We have analysed this point in the report on migration policies
.Migration, Transnational Practices and Belongings
Issues of belonging to and identification with the national community render national citizenship complicated for migrants as they negotiate multiple identities and allegiances, with varying outcomes (Leitner; Ehrkamp, 2006).
The theoreticians of the transnationalism perspective state that transnational practices of migrant families entail a challenge to the nation-state’s competence, which guarantees rights, reinforces duties and defends traditional notions of identity associated to national citizenship (Tambini 2001). At the same time, on the arena of political debate, there is a discussion around the dangers posed by the processes of migrant transnationalism to the national identity of the countries receivers of immigration. In addition, politicians, political analysts, policy makers and some mediatic discourses argument that the multiple alliances and different forms of citizenship interfere with the integration of the immigrant population in the places of destination.
However, according to Leitner and Ehrkamp (2006), migrants' perspectives on citizenship are rarely examined in either academic or public policy debates, which concentrate instead on broader legal -political aspects of citizenship- changes in national citizenship laws and policies and/or normative arguments about how citizenship should be conceived -making claims about immigrants' attitudes towards citizenship from afar (Bauböck, 1994; 2003; Miller, 2000; Soysal, 1994).
Our fieldwork allows us to confirm some questions that we have presented in other researches (Pedone 2008, 2009): transnational practices and the consequent consolidation of social transnational fields does not necessarily interfere with the feeling of belonging to the places of destination. Besides, the already introduced concept of positionality enables us to understand how the immigrant population creates meaning, ascribes to values and practices citizenship rights according to gender, social class, time of arrival, legal status, education level and the different migration strategies and trajectories.
Also, analysing local belonging together with the processes of transnationalism makes it possible for us to analyse the relations that emerge between the residents of a certain locality and the institutions at the local, regional, national and global levels, thus placing immigrants as neighbours of that place without resorting to preconceived ideas on whether their relations with the place are determined by nationality or ethnicity. Therefore, rather than “cultural differences”, it is the activity of traders which would be contributing to the restructuring of the cities (Glick Schiller 2008), as it is the case of the present case study.
In the reconstruction of the migration trajectories of interviewed immigrants we could identify the appearance of a feeling of belonging to the Poble Sec, where they carry out their daily life practices and successful business enterprises. This local territorial identification presents no contradiction with the claim for citizenship rights and with the exercise of transnational family, social, economic and political practices.
The diverse transnational practices that appear in out study reflect the variety of migration projects of interviewed persons. Those families who are in a stage of consolidation of their migration project –regularisation of legal status, capitalisation, family reunification, investments in destination- show in their discourse a stronger belonging to the neighbourhood as well as the need to get involved in associations that may improve their commercial activities in Poble Sec together with their transnational practices and the family debate around definite settling and return. For example, an immigrant coming from Dominican Republic who has a prosperous business in the neighbourhood, near Blai St., where they provide money sending services and they sell trips to Latin America, is also the president of an association of Dominican immigrants that sends money to his town of origin for social purposes; a Pakistani businessman that, together with his uncles, owns four shops on Blai St., belongs to the local Traders Association and has an active participation in the meetings that have recently been held in the neighbourhood to discuss the conflicts between the neighbours. This belonging is conjugated with a series of transnational family and economic practices that he has kept up for over a decade: he sends remittances every month not only to his wife and children but also to the extended family according to the amounts he agrees with his uncles to sustain their elders and the rest of the family in Pakistan.
The consolidation of processes of family transnationalism can be seen, to a great extent, as a result of the legal restrictions to obtain and keep a work permit and to apply for the reunification of sons and daughters at destination. In the cases in which the migration has been headed by a woman, the exercise of transnational maternity has ended up exceeding the period of time contemplated in the design of the migration project. Thus, young Dominican and Ecuadorian women continue to negotiate there mother role with grandmothers, sisters and sisters-in-law who form the care network in the place of origin. In other cases, when the migration has been headed by a man, as it is the case of the immigration coming from Pakistan, the social transnational fields consolidate because many of them have remained for many years in a situation of legal irregularity and managing to meet the necessary requirements for family reunification has been a very long process. An important number of these migrants has got married and had children during their temporary returns to origin, but they still cannot achieve family reunification at destination. According to recurrent accounts of the delays caused by the Spanish consulates in the places of origin, these are becoming more and more an informal practice of restriction of rights. And that is why some prefer to wait to obtain nationality (10 years) to make sure they will not have those kinds of restrictions.
Those families that consider settling definitively at the place of destination do not hence cease to encourage their transnational family practices: “We always go back on vacation to visit the family. Sometimes my children travel alone because, since their mother lives there, they spend all their holidays with her and her family. They really like to go there. We still want to settle here because there we see no stability. If that changes some day, then we’ll consider that possibility, but my sons want to study here. (Dominican man, member of the Poble Sec Traders Association).
However, the idea of a long-term return is a project that tends to star blurring out as sons and daughters grow up and study at the places of destination: “For now, I don’t think I’ll be here... Not an official return, but yes in many years from now, I don’t know how many. Those many years are a long time, I’m not speaking of a year, two or three. But then when I think about it, it is a little complicated. Because if you want to go back to your country of origin, you mustn’t have children. My daughter was born here, and although she recognises the Moroccan culture and she goes down to Morocco, she’ll feel from here, more than I do. She’ll be more comfortable here, because she will have her childhood friends. There will come a time when she’ll say ‘I’m from here, I can’t come down to Morocco’” (Moroccan woman works at the Poble Sec office of ATIMCA, Association of Moroccan Immigrant Workers of Catalonia).
All these testimonies question the simplistic conception that understands migration as leaving one place and arriving and settling at another and show that things are much more varied and complex. Some migrants have a mobile life with multiple belongings and relatives residing in different parts of the world. They tend to spend periods of time at the country of origin and then some other months or years at the country of immigration, taking advantage of the freedom granted by the access to nationality.
The findings of our study show us that citizenship practices led by the migrant population are produced at multiple scales and involve multiple public spheres that cross national borders and renegotiate relations between their homes in origin and in destination. This suggests that citizenship practices exceed the limits and jurisdictions of the nation-state.
Nevertheless, governments in the places of destination still insist on connecting citizenship rights to nationality. Although there are cases as the one of the Catalan government that promote an idea of citizenship based on the residence principle –but with a culturalist dimension that links the exercise of citizenship with the cultural patrimony of the society of destination and with the learning of the language-, these stances end up claiming that belonging goes in hand with the identification with the Catalan identity, as we mentioned in the point 2.5.
Opposed to this institutional view, some narratives understand that citizenship rights are an important subject in everyday lives of the migrant population. They determine their access to work and housing, their security, their transnational mobility and their participation in the social and economic spheres. For this reason, interviewed migrants insist on the need to access citizenship rights dissociated from the “national feeling”. In the words of Moroccan woman: “Up to the moment, I (and I speak for myself) haven’t had that feeling of saying I’m Catalan or I’m Spanish, I am Moroccan. Now, in terms of rights and duties, I am a citizen. Yes, I am a citizen with rights and duties... I don’t know, I’m a citizen of this country until the day I return there, or I don’t know. The majority does not feel Catalan. We are citizens, and when they claim, they claim for their rights and they know their duties” (Moroccan woman works at the Poble Sec office of ATIMCA).
Conclusions
The interviews with immigrants residing in Poble Sec since the late 1990s provide evidence of the important transformation in the composition of the neighbourhood’s population. These changes refer to the increase in the number of different kinds of shops (greengrocer’s, butcher’s, hairdresser’s, locutorios, bars) managed by immigrants, but they also refer to the growing presence of neighbours of immigrant origin since the beginnings of the 21st century.
But changes in the population that inhabits and moves around Poble Sec are not only linked to the ageing of the “old migration” of the 1950s and 1960s and to the growth of the “new migration” since the beginnings of the year 2000. The mediatic and political construction of Barcelona as a city with a broad and rich cultural offer has made it a centre of attraction for foreigners, who are not thought of as migrants from the dominant visions and divisions.
Conflicts around the public space exceed the immigration question and already existed before present immigrants arrived. However, with the increase of the presence of immigrants in the spanish cities, urban conflicts have come to be considered as problems caused by immigration. In this context, the term coexistence has become a keyword when discussing the matters of immigration and the use of public space.
As regards the forms of resolution of the conflicts understood as coexistence problems, two stances can be identified:
In the testimonies of our interviewees, the “cultural” matter and the difficulties to understand and communicate with those defined as different are emphasised when talking about conflicts referred to as “coexistence problems”. The weight of conflictivity thus fall mainly on the extra-communitarian immigrant population, though not in the same degree on all nationalities present in the neighbourhood. Nevertheless, our fieldwork has revealed a competition and differentiation in the use of the main public spaces of the neighbourhood which are determined by other factors.
Our fieldwork has revealed a competition and differentiation in the use of the main public spaces of the neighbourhood which are determined by the articulation of the following variables: gender, age, nationality, social class, family situation, legal status, working conditions and religious practice (only to mention those that come up more frequently). This perspective allows us to add complexity to the simplistic dichotomy autochthonous/immigrants and to show the differentiation, hierarchy and inequality regarding the access to public spaces within each of these to big groups, often conceived as homogenous realities.
Vital conditions imposed by a life dedicated to work shape the use given to public spaces. Probably that is why the interviewed migrants who work in the neighbourhood, whether they live there or not, do not frequent leisure places or experience that bohemian side advertised by the “Poble Sec brand”.
A constant in all the interviews with the immigrant population is this link between migration and labour. That is: all the testimonies explain the migration project as a strategy to get a better job. This “better job” does not always imply better working conditions, but it does provide a higher income and it allows the migrant to improve the life conditions of relatives (children, spouses, parents) who live in the country of origin through the sending of remittances.
In terms of the labour trajectories in the migration, certain differences regarding gender can be established on the basis of the testimonies. Men tend to work or have worked in construction and in service (waiters, cooks, supermarket cashiers, employees at a locutorio). Throughout the years, some of them have managed to set up their own companies in both sectors. In the case of women, although none of the interviewees is currently working in it, for many of them (and/or for their mothers) domestic work has been the first job they have had in Spain, and generally this is the way through which they have obtained the regularisation.
Labour, cause of migration in all discourses, somehow works as a legitimising element for an anomalous ilegitimate situation in the eyes of national logic: the immigrant presence.
The same can be said about the return, always present as a possibility (that does not become a reality in most cases), because migration is conceived (by sending and receiving states and by the immigrants themselves) as temporary, provisional; a momentary dis-order in the national order.
Gender is a variable that conditions the forms of circulating the neighbourhood. Different interviewees agreed in pointing out that, in general, women are seen more during the day: in social services, courses, doctors’ offices, school doors, neighbourhood parties, and very often with their boys and girls. Male presence is dominant in certain bars, in parks, in corners and mainly at night.
Religious practice, age, migration project, social class also emerges in some testimonies as a factor that conditions the forms of inhabiting and moving around the neighbourhood.
In relation to the participation of immigrants in public space and life, in the accounts of immigrants, the reason for the scarce participation is the lack of time, having working hours that leave little room for other kinds of activities. Opposed to this explanation, some workers of the social services point to the lack of information, interest or habit. However, amongst the interviewees who consider themselves autochthonous, social or political participation in the neighbourhood does not seem to be the rule, but rather the exception.
Through the discourses on the participation in these public spaces, certain images concerning gender also emerge: gender relations and the production and reproduction tasks that condition the ways in which social agents, many of whom are women, conceive the world. When speaking of immigrants, especially Muslim, the higher female presence in social services is thought of, as a sort of continuation of family care tasks, socially assigned to women. But since, in reality, those tasks are still not considered as work, many of the interviewed refer to a larger time availability. To say it simply: women go more because, since they do not work, they have more time.
These views overlook an important fact: social services, as well as all kinds of associations and even churches, tend to plan a lot of interventions aimed at women, since they are considered to be more vulnerable, in greater need, passive, submissive, and because they are worked with thinking of their role as responsible for family welfare and, in the case of the immigrant population, as bridges between the culture of origin and the culture of destination.
In the interviews on the use of the Primary Health Care Centre, some important differences regarding gender, age and national and cultural origin also emerge. It is women once again who use this service more.
We can establish a typology for the use of the health care services amongst migrant, which he connects to mentality, but that should also be considered in connection to life and working conditions of the migrant population, and to the time they have been living in Spain.
In Spain, the hegemonic discourse, widely present in the mediatic and political fields, connects migration to insecurity in the public space. This securitarian view of migrations also appears in some of our interviews, as well as diverse forms in which public space, security/insecurity and migration are articulated. An articulation that is also affected by gender relations in origin and destination, by age, by the particular life trajectories.
In the field of Spanish migration policies, the combination of the axes centralism/federalisation and statism/privatisation has given impulse to a third tendency: the gradual but evident movement from universalist and generalist approaches (normalisation) to particularist and multicultural measures (Agrela y Dietz 2005). We have confirmed this three tendencies in our fieldwork, where we saw and important labour carried out by immigrants, women and neighbours associations in the management of programmes promoted and funded by the municipal government. Also the Church covers an outstanding role in the assistance of the most vulnerable immigrant population in Poble Sec, especially the undocumented and unemployed, and also works in connection with the neighbourhood’s social services.
Importance of representations of gender and immigration in the design, management and assessment of the urban “integration” and “participation” policies and programmes. Women are the target of most activities of these organisations because they are considered to be in greater need of support. The purpose of these interventions is to promote their participation, emancipation, education, instruction, and to debate topics that should be of their interest.
Implicit and explicit connection between cohesion and diversity; diversity is a threat for cohesion and hence it must be managed. This idea is strongly linked to the paradigm of the Nation State, wich imagines culturally homogenous societies and therefore perceives all “difference” as a threat to national integrity (or cohesion).
The insistence in promoting the participation is connected to the hegemonic perception of integration as a matter of commitment and will. Somehow, this idealised participation would show the interest of the immigrant person on belonging to the society in which he or she lives. All of this in a context -it is good to remember this- where general participation of the citizens in public issues is progressively less and less. It is as if the immigrant population is always expected and demanded to overact , something that Sayad denominates an excess of politesse. A constant test of their loyalty towards the nation.
In the institutional discourse, managing diversity after the arrival of immigrants translates into the issue of coexistence that emphasises much more the cultural differences than the socio-economic inequalities. At this point, intercultural mediators appear, as well as the organisation of language lessons (both of Catalan and Spanish) and the matter is expressed in municipal plans, mediation services and NGOs’ activities.
Productivity of approaching migrants as residents of the place, since it allows us to analyse their role as creators of scale without resorting to preconceived ideas about how their relations with the place are determined by nationality or origin.
Our fieldwork allows us to confirm some questions that we have presented in other researches (Pedone 2008, 2009): transnational practices and the consequent consolidation of social transnational fields does not necessarily interfere with the feeling of belonging to the places of destination.
In the reconstruction of the migration trajectories of interviewed immigrants we could identify the appearance of a feeling of belonging to the Poble Sec, where they carry out their daily life practices and successful business enterprises. This local territorial identification presents no contradiction with the claim for citizenship rights and with the exercise of transnational family, social, economic and political p All these testimonies question the simplistic conception that understands migration as leaving one place and arriving and settling at another and show that things are much more varied and complex. Some migrants have a mobile life with multiple belongings and relatives residing in different parts of the world. They tend to spend periods of time at the country of origin and then some other months or years at the country of immigration, taking advantage of the freedom granted by the access to nationality.
The findings of our study show us that citizenship practices led by the migrant population are produced at multiple scales and involve multiple public spheres that cross national borders and renegotiate relations between their homes in origin and in destination. This suggests that citizenship practices exceed the limits and jurisdictions of the nation-state.
Political recommendations
Based on the results of the present study (o “on the research work of our team”), we recommend the corresponding authorities at the different levels of government to implement the necessary policies in order to:
European Union Level
Facilitate the real exercise of a Civic Citizenship which guarantees the social, economical, political and cultural rights of all the residents in the EU, without any discrimination on the grounds of gender, age, ethnic group, social class, sexual orientation, religion or nationality.
Dissociate political rights from nationality.
Homogenize the criteria for the participation of non-communitarian migrants in local, regional, state and communitarian elections in all the communitarian countries.
Homogenize and guarantee the right to family formation and reunification to the non-communitarian migrant population, without any discrimination on the grounds of gender, sexual orientation, language, social class, economic level, religion, age, income or nationality.
Avoid by all means making the non-communitarian immigrant population the scapegoat of the current economic crisis.
State Level
Homogenize the criteria for the access to the Spanish nationality.
Dissociate the non-communitarian population's right to vote in local elections from the signing of bilateral agreements with the countries of origin. This practice, currently in force, is based on a discrimination in terms of the access to political rights on the grounds of national origin.
Guarantee the right to family living to non-communitarian immigrants, without restrictions of age, nationality, gender, sexual orientation or economic income.
Guarantee the right to education to all minors under the age of 18, regardless of their legal status.
Avoid by all means making the non-communitarian immigrant population the scapegoat of the current economic crisis.
Autonomous Level
Guarantee the right to education to all minors under the age of 18 residing in Catalonia, regardless of their legal status.
Guarantee the right to health of all the non-communitarian population residing in Catalonia, regardless of their legal status.
Create and promote social services that allow migrant women to ensure a care network for their sons and daughters reunified at destination.
Guarantee the effective exercise of the freedom of religion.
Avoid by all means making the non-communitarian immigrant population the scapegoat of the current economic crisis.
Local Level
Guarantee the registration of all the people residing in the territory of the city of Barcelona, regardless of their legal status.
Guarantee the access to healthcare of all the neighbors of the city of Barcelona, regardless of their legal status.
Offer a greater flexibility in the opening hours of the Healthcare Center in order to let the service adjust to workdays, especially those of migrant people.
Create and promote social services that allow migrant women to ensure a care network for their sons and daughters reunified at destination.
Guarantee the right to the effective exercise of the freedom of religion by facilitating the creation of spaces where the different religious groups can gather and pray.
Organize a system to manage the renting of apartments or houses which guarantees migrant families' access to housing avoiding situations of discrimination.
Promote a policy of public subsidies for rents aimed at low-income families and individuals (retired, young, immigrant people) in order to avoid processes of gentrification in certain areas of the city and of degradation and overcrowding in others.
Create meeting places and playgrounds for the children and young people of the neighborhood.
Take advantage of the associative networks already existing in the neighborhood to establish stronger bonds between the autochthonous and immigrant population.
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Methodological Annex Methodological Annex
The research team designed a chart for data collection which has allowed us to systematize the qualitative information obtained in the fieldwork. It includes the data on key informants (who they are, their location and the type of contacts they provide) and information about interviewers (fundamental aspects of their situation and discourse) with the purpose of reaching the objectives set for the present study.
POBLE SEC Fieldwork January and July 2009. Interview chart
Sex and age
Place of origin
and where they come from
Causes for migration
Arrival
(Date, individual, networks, chains)
Labour situation
origin/destination,
Educational level
Migration condition
(legal status, movements, use of public space)
Use of public spaces for leisure (frequency,
use / non-use)
Associationism
(political, associative participation)
Transnational practices
(family, social and economic)
*Female, 29
Montevideo, Uruguay (many years in Buenos Aires)
Angry at Buenos Aires for difficulties to study and work, wanted to search for a better life in Barcelona, wanted to study theatre.
2000. Her elder brother had been living in Barcelona for a long time. Then her younger brother came, later her mother and finally her sister 3 years ago.
Many years a cashier at a locutorio, at a dermatologist office before coming. Finished school and has dedicated to theatre. Here she has worked in many administrative things, as a dish washer, and has been working in advising on migration proceedings.
Had Italian nationality before thinking of coming. It was easy to get the residence card.
Blai St. especially at night and the terrazas in the summer. Montjuic in the summer. Other neighbourhoods: El Raval, Barceloneta and Borne in the summer.
Nothing in the neighbourhood. Collaborated with meetings of Latin American women for a research-action project.
Very little use of the telephone, only at Christmas and birthdays. Always in touch through e-mail with nuclear family. Since all her family is in Barcelona, she has no networks in Buenos Aires. Never sent remittances. Only went back once for her sister’s wedding.
*Female, 24
Guayaquil, Ecuador
To provide her daughter with better material possibilities.
May 2008. Her mother has been living in Barcelona for 10 years. Her godmother and daughters live here too.
Last work at origin: pharmacist’s. Finished school, did not go to university because she was mother at 16. Since august 2008, she works at the café-bar Mai Tai, owned by her mother’s husband.
Came with a working contract obtained through her mother, after two rejected attempts. Works all day, every day and goes from her house to the bar and viceversa. Some days, she drops her mother’s mother in law at a daycare centre at Ronda San Pau. Sometimes goes by the locutorio.
Some sundays goes for a walk with her godmother and her daughters, they have gone to the cinema, but she does not go out much to save herself conflicts with her mother, who gets upset.
None
Talks on the phone almost everyday with her daughter and younger sister. Sends money every two or three months for daily expenses and for her daughter’s studies. In march 2009 she went to visit for the first time.
*Male, 27
Pakistan
To work
2002-2003. Friends and cousins lived in Barcelona.
At home he did not work, he helped his father a little with the plantation. He finished school. Has worked at many food shops, donner, and has been working at Donner Gondal for 3 years.
Came without papers, worked off the books (en negro) for several months, especially at restaurants, and after one year he got a contract in one of those places and had his first card. Now he is a resident. Getting his papers required a long process because he did not know he was supposed to register when he arrived.
He lived with a friend in Hospitalet and he goes back there in his free time on the weekends (Saturday). Works all day from Sundays to Fridays.
None.
Often talks on the phone with his father especially because he tells him about what happens in the neighbourhood. His mother does not leave the house much. He sends money to help his family because only his father works. He does travel home when he can, depends on the money available.
Male, 29
Pakistan
His father asked him to go, to look for work and a different life.
2002. His elder brother has been living in Barcelona for 20 years. Then came his younger brother (2005)
He did not work, he helped his father a little with the plantation. He studied until he was 15 and then he dropped out. Since he arrived, he has worked as a cook at different restaurants. He opened a bar with a partner. At a time, he worked at a factory in loading and unloading.
He came with a working contract obtained through his elder brother. He already has his residence and he is going to apply for nationality.
During the summer, he spends all night at the park in the corner of Blai St. and Parallel (in front of the Mai Tai café) chatting and having a drink. In the winter, he likes to sit in the sun at Montjuic. He only passes by Blai St. to go to Donner Gondal and to the locutorio of a friend.
None
He calls often, talks to his mother more. He has already travelled 5 times to Pakistan. In February 2009, he was going there to get married. He was going to stay 6 months. At first, he sent money to his parents through an agency, now he doesn’t (he is paying the bar’s mortgage). He uses the opportunity to send things when somebody travels.
Male, 40
Pakistan
Came to look for work
His contacts were friends
At origin, he lived with his parents and he did not work.
2002. He came with papers, he had no problems to find employment within the networks of his compatriots. For the past 3 years, he has been working at a locutorio in Poble Sec.
His leisure spaces are preferably in Poble Sec, on Blai St. and on Paralell. He also visits El Raval because he has Pakistani friends there He emphasises the presence of Dominicans in the public space and the fact that they generate problems at the locutorio.
Works all day at thelocutorio and is unaware of the existence of associations
Travels every year to visit family. He does not send remittances but he does take gifts every time he goes there.
Female, 39
Oruro, Bolivia
To search for a better life, to work
Her mother and sister were already here. She came with her husband and daughter.
2002. She studied to be a dentist (she has been trying for over a year to get her degree to be validated in Barelona). Since she arrived, she has worked at her fruit shop all day. Sometime she was a dentist’s assistant, but the pay was very bad.
They came as tourists, with her husband and daughter. They obtained their papers in the mass regularisation of 2005. They are waiting for nationality. She lives upstairs from the fruit shop, so she does not move around much.
She doesn’t have much free time, the fruit shop opens every day of the week. Although her mother helps her, she’s there almost all day. Besides, she is a mother, she takes care of the house and she is studying for her validation exams.
---
Has already bought a house in Oruro.
*female, 25
Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
In search for a better economic condition, has a daughter at origin.
2007. She contacted her biological who has been living in Madrid for many years with some aunts of her. She has no family in Barcelona. She came to the house of an acquaintance from origin.
In Santo Domingo, she worked a t a supermarket. In Barcelona, she has worked at a coffee shop. Now she is on a maternity leave (7 months pregnant).
She came to Madrid the first time through family reunification. She didn’t like it there, she went back to Santo Domingo and she came back to Barcelona with a working contract. She has her working permit and now she will be a mother.
On the weekends, she tend to walk around with her boyfriend in the outskirts of Barcelona, and on Sundays, the family gets together at the house of his parents. She spend weekdays at home or at the house of her in-laws (neighbours), and in the afternoon, she tends to go to Sana’s bar on Blai St.
None. She does not want to meet people because she has had many disappointments.
Talks to her daughter on the phone every day. She calls from her house. She is waiting for the permission to bring her through reunification. Also talks to her mother and sister. She sends about 600 euros each month stating how they should be spent.
Male, 34
Santiago, Dominican Republic
The currency devaluation lowered the profit of the shop and they searched for opportunities abroad.
His wife is daughter of Spanish nationals but they had no particular contact in Barcelona. Some acquaintances.
At origin, they had a jeweller’s shop, just as what they set up here on Blai St.: New York Jeweller’s.
Wife had the citizenship, so him and their sons got a 2-year visa, without a work permit. This made him move around as a peddler and get to know different parts of the city, especially the neighbourhoods with immigrant population. Being here, they applied for family reunification and they also have a 3-year-old son who was born here.
---
Apparently none. Knows of the existence of FEDELATINA.
They tend to go to origin on vacation. In his life as trader, he has commercial transnational practices between Dominican Rep., New York and Barcelona.
*Female, 30
Venezuela
Unhappy with Chavez, searching for more tranquility, stability
2003, together with her friend Rosa Elena. First in Mallorca. No family or friend contacts.
At origin, they had a clothing store together. They’ve had the same here for 5 years, on Blai St.: Sully Sport.
They came as tourists. Now they are residents. They have travelled a lot around Europe due to clothing trading. They live in the back of the store, so they don’t move around much.
Every Sunday they go to the Pentecostal church of the neighbourhood.
None besides the church.
They call their families in Venezuela from a locutorio. They also use e-mail. Contacts due to clothing trading.
*Female, 46
Venezuela
Unhappy with Chavez, , searching for more tranquility, stability
2003, together with her friend Sujei. No family contacts at destination.
At origin, they had a clothing store together. They’ve had the same here for 5 years, on Blai St.: Sully Sport.
They came as tourists. Now they are residents. They have travelled a lot around Europe due to clothing trading. They live in the back of the store, so they don’t move around much.
Every Sunday they go to the Pentecostal church of the neighbourhood.
The only socialisation is at the Pentecostal church.
They call their families in Venezuela from a locutorio. They also use e-mail. Contacts due to clothing trading.
*Female, 35
China
To work
10 years ago, together with her husband and elder daughter (13 years old). Relatives in Barcelona.
For 6 months, her husband and her have had café-bar on Blai St.
They are residents. They live a few blocks away from the café, on Sant Antoni, but she never goes home by herself at night.
She takes her 5-year-old son to the park, goes shopping, stays at home.
None.
Speaks to her parents and in-laws every day. When she had her younger son, she’d leave him 6 months at his grandparents’ house in China and she had him 6 months with her here, until he was 4 years old.
Female, 28
Bangladesh
To be with her husband
8 years from now. Her husband was waiting for her.
At origin, she did not work. Here she helps at an Food Shop and a fruit shop that she has together with her husband and one of her brothers, both on Blai St.
She came through family reunification. Her children were born in Barcelona (a very young boy and a baby girl). The shops are very close to her house so she does not move around much.
She walks with her son and her baby, takes them to the park, they walk around the neighbourhood. She is at home.
Yes, she participates with her husband in the association of people from Bangladesh. The do cultural activities, dance, food, others.
No data
Female, 40
Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
Wanted to improve economic conditions
1992. She came helped by her sister who was already in Barcelona
At origin, she was a teacher. She worked 13 years in domestic service. Then she bought a shop from a Dominican friend.
She regularised because she married a Spanish man. She brought her elder son and her mother through reunification.
Has a restaurant of Dominican food on Blai St.
Is an active member of the Traders Association and of the Committee of the Fiesta Mayor on Bali St.
She has all her family in Barcelona. She hasn’t been travelling to Dominican Rep. for 8 years.
Female, 30
Dominican Republic
Needed better economic conditions to sustain her daughter
2007. She came because her father was here with his wife. She is the one who helped her migrate.
Both at origin and destination, she works as a hairdresser.
They made her a contract at origin for domestic service. Currently works at the hairdressing salon of her father’s wife.
The hairdressing salon were she works is a meeting place with the Dominican population.
Does not participate in associations.
She has not arrived long ago and she plans to return to origin shortly.
Female, 34
Santiago, Dominican Republic
Her father offered to set up a hairdressing salon for her at origin or to bring her to Barcelona. She preferred coming to get to know how it was here. In view of the precariousness she has found, she thinks it was not the best choice.
1992. Her father brought her through reunification.
At origin, she was studying high-school and, at night, a hairdressing academy. When she arrived, she started working in domestic service. Currently combines her cleaning job at a hotel with her work as hairdresser at her own salon set up in Poble Sec.
At the time of her arrival, it was not complicated to get the papers. She obtained them with a work contract in domestic service.
They do the shopping outside the neighbourhood, but the live their everyday lives in the neighbourhood because of her job and of the school that her daughters attend, located in the neighbourhood.
Does not participate in associations.
In the first years of the migration, she went to Dominican Republic every year. Then she got married and had two daughters and now it’s been several years since she hasn’t gone there. Her parents have returned and she plans to return when her daughters grow up. That’s why she has bought a property at origin.
Male, 45
Santiago, Dominican Republic
Decided to migrate because he had a little daughter that he looked after at origin and his wife was living in Barcelona.
December 1998. He entered with a tourist visa.
At origin, he worked at a factory of road asphalt. At destination, he worked in construction during the first years in situation of dependency. Currently, he has a small construction company.
When he got here, he found a job offer and he could regularise within three months of arrival.
He does a lot of things in the neighbourhood. His daughters go to a subsidised school in the neighbourhood and his wife has a hairdressing salon also in Poble Sec.
Does not participate in associations.
They travel to Dominican Republic every year to visit their relatives. They do not send remittances anymore. They have invested money in buying land.
Male, 33
“Far South” of Dominican Republic
Decided to migrate because his wife had headed the family migration.
2002. He was brought by his first wife through reunification.
At origin, he learnt the craft of being a tailor. He came with reunification papers. At first, he worked off the books in construction because he could not worked because he had the reunified status. Currently, he owns an agency that sends money abroad and also a taylor’s shop located in the back part of it.
He has been living in Poble Sec since 2005 because he likes the neighbourhood and he has other Dominican friends. He has also bought an apartment and he has his own shop.
In the weekends, he frequents the Dominican restaurants on Blai St.
Is president of an association of Dominicans but that does not work in Poble Sec, but in a neighbourhood of the old city of Barcelona inhabited by a higher number of Dominican families.
The association he presides has an eminently transnational character. They raise funds amongst Dominicans residing in Barcelona to send to origin for social causes.
Female, 27
Morocco
She was brought by her husband through reunification.
2004. He came because she got married in Morocco and her husband was already living in Spain.
At origin, she completed the career of Hispanic and Arabic philology.
She came with the legal regularity of family reunification.
She works in the neighbourhood and does not use the neighbourhood’s public spaces for leisure.
Works at ATIMCA
Has permanent contact with her family and both her and her husband think about returning.
Male, 36
Pujab, Pakistan
He came to Germany because an uncle on his mother’s side was there and to Barcelona, because of a cousin.
June 1996. He migrated to Germany a year before that, and then to Barcelona.
At origin, he finished high-school, worked at a pharmacist’s. At destination, he began working as a waiter assistant. Currently has 5 shops on Blai St. together with his uncle.
He obtained legal regularity in the regularisation process of 2000.
Is a daily user of Blai St., where he has all his shops.
Member of the Poble Sec Traders Association.
He had a family-concerted marriage in the year 2000. He has two children because he makes periodical trips to Pakistan. Two years ago, he began the process for family reunification. He sends remittances to his family and to an vast network of relatives.
Source: Of our own elaboration - Claudia Pedone, Paula Castello Starkoff, Lucía Solavagione, January 2009 January 2010.
* People with whom we have a periodical contact and who have been interviewed more than once
Relation chart with key informants. Fieldwork carried out in Poble Sec between January 2009 and January 2010
Sex and age
Association they belong to
Time involved
Opinions regarding the use of public space
Key information for the project
Contacts provided
* Male, 49
(Eudossio)
President of the Traders Association of Poble Sec
The first interview was in April 2009 and since then he has actively participated in all the stages of the research.
He thinks the use of the public space should be regulated, speaks in favor of the dialog between the autochthonous and immigrant population and claims for a higher police presence in the streets in order to ensure security in the public space.
Detailed history of the stages of population settlement in the neighborhood and of the current conflicts regarding the use of the public space.
Other members of the Traders Association of Poble Sec and representatives of the Ayuntamiento.
* Female, 45
(Lidia)
Member of the Traders Association of Poble Sec.
The first interview was in May 2009 and since then she has actively participated in all the stages of the research.
She thinks the use and the competition for the public space is more affected by the variables of gender and age than by “intercultural problems”.
Information on the relation between autochthonous and immigrant population in one of the studied public spaces: Blai Street.
Other members of the Traders Association of Poble Sec and representatives of the Ayuntamiento.
* Male, 42
(Manel)
Member of the Traders Association of Poble Sec.
The first interview was in October 2009 and since then he has actively participated in all the stages of the research.
He admits that belonging to a certain social class generates stigmatizing discourses on some uses that autochthonous and immigrant young people make of the public space.
He walked us through the neighborhood to show us its physical and symbolic borders.
Other members of the Traders Association of Poble Sec.
* Female, 25
Jéssica
Member of the Platform Poble Sec per a Tothom
Two-hour In-depth interview and periodical contacts throughout the research process.
Description of changes in the use of the public space over the last decade according to the variables of gender, generation and origin (autochthonous and immigrant).
Profound knowledge of the neighborhood's dynamics in terms of the relation between the autochthonous and the immigrant population. Information regarding the associative networks in the neighborhood.
Doctor of the Healthcare Center.
* Female, 27
Noelia
Coordinator of the Community Plan in the neighborhood
Two-hour In-depth interview and periodical contacts throughout the research process.
Description of changes in the use of the public space over the last decade according to the variables of gender, generation and origin (autochthonous and immigrant).
Description of Poble Sec's Community Plan. Management of immigration by the Ayuntamiento.
Doctor of the Healthcare Center. Employee of the ATIMCA.
Female, 26
Clerk at the Library of Poble Sec
One-hour in-depth interview.
She finds that the use of the public space is more intensive since Blai street became a pedestrian way. She thinks that those who consume at the new bars and restaurants are students (autochthonous and foreign) and a Catalonian middle class that comes looking for that service during the weekends.
Information on the use of the public library space detailing dynamics crossed by gender, generation, origin (autochthonous or immigrant) and times of the day and the week.
----
Male, 35
Parish priest of the Catholic Church
One-hour in-depth interview.
Information on the physical and symbolic borders of the neighborhood. Impact on the use of the public space of the autochthonous and immigrant population of praying centers (Muslim oratories and evangelist assemblies).
Stages and changes in the arrival of immigrant population to the neighborhood.
Coordinator of Entities of Poble Sec.
Femal, 27
Spanish teacher at the NGO La Formiga
One-hour in-depth interview.
Information on the uses that migrant women make of the public spaces in the neighborhood.
Personal and family dynamics of Moroccan and Pakistani women
----
Female, 26
Catalan teacher at the Civic Center of Poble Sec
One-hour in-depth interview.
----
Information on the interest that immigrant students have in learning the Catalan language as a tool for integration in Catalonia.
With autochthonous neighbors and students.
Male, 38
Doctor of the Healthcare Center Les Hortes
One-hour in-depth interview.
----
Information on the relation between heath and family within the immigrant population. Gender dynamics.
----
3 female and 1 male
Representatives of the Ayuntamiento. Sants-montjuic district.
Two-hour meeting at the Ayuntamiento
They minimize the possible conflicts in the public space and they described in detail the social projects that the Ayuntamiento leads in the neighborhood.
Material on the conformation of the coexistence table. Description of social programs in Poble Sec.
-------
Source: Elaborated by Claudia Pedone and Lucía Solavagione based on the information obtained in the fieldwork.
* People with whom we have a periodical contact and who have been interviewed more than once