At the Museu d’Història de la Immigracio, Jordi, the guide, proposes an exercise to the schoolchildren. Standing in a circle, he asks those who are immigrants to raise their hands. Some raise them. Then he asks those who are children of immigrants to raise them. And then the grandchildren. At the end, almost all the students have their hands raised.
In any European city that has not entered into a process of impoverishment, something similar would happen if we did the same exercise.
The first Spanish emigration law dates back to 1907. It is already 115 years old. A century and a bit.
In the archive of the Casa de l’Ardiaca in Barcelona there is a copy of a report on what this law intended to achieve: a legal and orderly emigration –I trust that these words are familiar to you now–.
Reading those pages is devastating. It describes the hundreds of thousands of Spanish emigrants -many of them Catalans- who were enslaved in Latin America. A large part of them were considered illegal immigrants.
From this period, in Catalonia, there is hardly any other memory than the houses of the Indians. The lucky ones who came back and built sensational mansions. But we have erased the majority memory of the losers.
Between the late 19th century and the Great Depression, 52 million Europeans fled the continent. And this process was almost never friendly, neither for those who arrived nor for those who were already there where they landed.
The treatment for the Spanish republicans in La Retirada was not kind, nor was it for the hundreds of thousands of gasterbeiter -guest workers-, the Spaniards in the factories of the German miracle.
The Franco regime also tried to achieve legal and orderly emigration. Even the Barcelona of the regime had for some years its own return policy for those who arrived in the city. Any of us can prove that policy failed.
The Bidasoa River in Iruña has always been a transit point for Spanish clandestine emigrants to rich Europe. Many perished by drowning. Now emigrants still die there. Let it be known, the last one was Denko, a young Guinean who dragged the current in April of this year.
One of the first Moroccan communities settled in the north of Spain is in Figueres. Its origin dates back to the oil crisis of the seventies. The French unions, faced with the severe deterioration of the internal labor market, urged their government to close the borders. Moroccans crossing the peninsula to reach prosperous France were trapped in Portbou. And here they made their life.
Thus, everything indicates that, except for humanity’s undying desire to prosper, everything else is destined, over time, to change.
Zygmunt Bauman, in his posthumous book Retrotopia (Paidos) underlines that trying to block the path to this reality “is as ridiculous as the decision to barricade oneself at home to avoid the consequences of a nuclear war”. And if this is so, the question is: do we want to respond better than our ancestors to this challenge? And if the answer is yes, how do we do it?
In any case, nostalgia for our uniform past – white, Christian and Western – does not seem like a realistic option.
