The face of exclusion, hate

eva constantares

todo el mundo

Nearly one week after anti-Semitic graffiti stunned the campus community, everyone in Grinnell is talking about racism. On the three and a half year anniversary of 9/11, the Unites States should be discussing racism and persistent racial profiling. On the one-year anniversary of 11-M (11 marzo, or March 11), the terrorist train bombings in Madrid by Muslim extremist that killed 190 people, Spain has to address discrimination and growing xenophobia as the population becomes increasingly diverse but remains uncompromisingly segregated.

It turns out Spain has kids after all; they aren’t native Spaniards, but rather immigrants, a segment of the population that does not seem to be included in “todo el mundo.” When suddenly faced with this reality and an earful of Eminem I could honestly tell a 13-year old Moroccan-Spanish boy at an over-crowded inner-city youth center that I really didn’t have the vocabulary to translate “The Real Slim Shady” into Spanish for him.

He offered to teach me the words in Spanish and Arabic if I taught him in English, but I didn’t feel it was the appropriate venue for that kind of exchange. But who knows if I will have any other opportunity, other than the Wednesday afternoons at the center, since that’s one of the few occasions that I have witnessed people of different races interacting. El País, Spain’s most popular newspaper, released an opinion poll in January reporting that for the first time ever, the majority of Spaniards think there are too many foreigners in the country.

Since native Spaniards aren’t having their own kids, the country depends on the increasing influx of immigrants to bolster the economy, yet as immigration increases, so does prejudice. The immigrants, originating mostly from Eastern Europe, Northern Africa and Latin America, now constitute six percent of the population.

They might be saving the pension system from bankruptcy, stimulating economic growth, expanding the job market by filling low-paying positions and boosting the position of women in the professional world by caring for their children, but the majority of Spaniards still blames immigrants for crime and wage reduction, according to the January report. Luckily, the Spanish government has come to realize what’s good for it and has, within the last few months, adopted a liberal amnesty policy for illegal immigrants after issuing automatic citizenship to the families of the 50 immigrant victims who were killed in the 11-M attack.

My host mother, a proud member of what we have dubbed the “Furs for Franco” crowd–composed of just about every dead-animal clad woman over the age of sixty–exemplifies a deeply entrenched and recently emerging xenophobia. She advised us when we arrived not to go to certain neighborhoods because of the Chinese and Latin American immigrant populations. Today as we watched the news, she told me that she gets nervous every time she sees a woman wearing a “pañuelo” (hankerchief; headscarf) because the Arabs come to Spain for no other reason than to kill people.

11-M has aggravated already prevalent misgivings about the presence of North Africans, mostly Moroccans, and like in the United States, has provoked anti-Islamic activity. The director of the center recounted an incident in which a Muslim girl’s backpack was taken from her and tossed back and forth before the staff intervened. She dismissed the harassment as a result of fear that would soon blow over.

Today’s newspaper paper focused on the arrest of yet another Moroccan suspected to be have been involved in the bombing, rather than on how Spanish society and race relations have changed over the last year. Tonight’s news showed footage of a solidarity march of Moroccan professionals in Madrid showing their solidarity with the victims of last year’s attack. Such acts of self-defense to counteract unfair stereotyping have been met with limited success; the next story was about Moroccan soccer players on a Spanish team being heckled and insulted by audience members during the game.

So today, “todo el mundo” consists of Moco, Achmed, Rocció, Mónica, Jiro, Olivia, Oscar, António, Raul and all the other kids at the center whose names I haven’t memorized yet, the kids at Grinnell who were subjected to bigotry and to everyone else who has ever felt like the world would rather do without them.