How do we open the spaces through which the extreme right wing grows and expands? The refractory treatment of migrants is undoubtedly one of them. An overview of old technologies and new strategies of dehumanization.
Many times the networks of activists and allies of the anti-racist struggle echo messages claiming the right of every human being to migrate. The communication almost always emphasizes the need to connect with the migratory phenomenon from empathy, humanism, the need for justice and reparation. To this end, they often speak of the migratory past of Europeans, of the permanent possibility of any individual becoming a future migrant and of appreciating the value of the so-called “differences” and their contribution as an enriching element of today’s societies.
In today’s Europe, the right wing continues to present itself as the safeguard of the nation, of democratic institutions, of the community and of age-old traditional practices in the face of a globalizing capitalism. While in practice all this translates into the rejection of the migrant, the left is unable to find tools, messages or words to dismantle decades of hatred and normalize the view of the migratory process. On the other hand, indifference is also the gap through which discriminatory speeches slip in the apparently innocuous form of an informal chat in the neighborhood or disapproving glances in public transportation.
The construction of the migrant as a threat is due to the existence of a hegemonic history based on a narrative in which “our” community, the one with which we share values, worldviews, norms and ideas, is defined by a specific geographic space marked by borders that must be continuously protected against external threats. According to this narrative, the migrant person comes to represent the invading entity, who is not defined as an agent of memory or contribution, but is accused of “using” the city in a parasitic way, without mentioning who takes advantage of whom in this game with people in a condition of legal, economic and social precariousness.
We have always studied that slavery or the violence of forced labor was something that happened in another place, in another time and that has nothing to do with us. But, on the contrary, as Josep Maria Fradera points out, slavery was the new technology of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which drew the line of difference that turned highly successful countries into unsuccessful ones.
When we speak of historical memory it seems that we are talking about a single and indivisible category, a memory that is governed by the same values and that is the heritage of all citizens, systematically erasing not only the existence of multiple memories within that same citizenry, but also events of injustice, pain and death that involve both nationals and the migrant population originating from ex-colonial territories.
History is cyclical; the erasure of citizenship and memory is cyclical as well. Like the rest of the European constitutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the first Spanish constitutions of the early nineteenth century were born in the Cortes de Cadiz with a very definite division between the European metropolitan space and the colonial space. It was clear that imperial power had to be extended on colonial soil through repressive and violent forms that would not have been tolerated by the inhabitants of the metropolis, thus creating an exceptional or different legal framework for the colonies because they did not belong to the space regulated as a “nation”. Therefore, the former subjects, now transformed into citizens, could not enjoy the same rights as those of the European territory.
C. Baldwin speaks of a colonial mentality that is not new, stating that in Spain there are many people anchored in a past of genuinely colonial ambitions. It is a colonial mentality nurtured by centuries of colonial plunder and by a legal system that kept the inhabitants of the colonies outside the system of rights, representation and citizen institutions. We cannot forget that the first Spanish constitution was born tacitly admitting slavery in its article V, which also clearly prevents access to citizenship to the so-called “brown castes” and limits the right of domestic servants.
In this way, the old vassalage relations, the formulas of blood cleansing and the hierarchies of the old monarchy are incorporated into the new legal frameworks created in the 19th century and are reproduced to this day. The white hegemony that was accustomed to legislate on non-white bodies using figures such as the laws of blood cleansing, continues to do so today through the Alien Law and devices of control of the colonial space such as identification by racial profiling.
“[…] a colonial mentality nurtured by centuries of colonial spoliation and by a legal system that kept the inhabitants of the colonies outside the system of rights, representation and citizen institutions.”
However, there is a difference with the past. If before the special laws were created so that the conflicts of the colonies, the blood, the violence and the death would remain in that wild, rustic and unregulated colonial space according to the hegemonic norms, today all this reality is transferred to the European space. The dehumanizing spectacle is even more atrocious as it takes place every day before the eyes and indifference of the citizens. This is why we must always remember that in order to build a true historical memory we need the memory of others, which must be connected to justice and the reparation of human dignity.
Our motto must be to re-humanize where there was dehumanization and to build a citizenry that thinks about complex historical processes with maturity.
The statues, the history that unfolds in monumental form before our eyes, are not designed for complexity, but for glorification, for the cult of paradigms of success. They are not made for thinking, for asking ourselves what sense it makes to honor figures who raised their fortunes at the cost of slave technology or devices such as the slave ship, the imperial galleon, trade routes, factories, factories, banks, or global assembly lines that hide the exploitation of the worker, the monopolization of goods and services, and corruption.
The nostalgic festivities of the Maresme, where giants inspired by slavers appear, the whole town is dressed in white, “exotic” delicacies are prepared to remember a colonial past or dances, songs and half-naked black bodies are exoticized, are not designed for reflection either. They are made to maintain living in indifference and in the violation of the human dignity of those bodies constructed as others; they are made for the nostalgic rejoicing of a past and the glorification of a wealthy Spaniard for his enterprising spirit, not to speak of his hands stained with the blood and sweat of the bodies of more than twelve million Africans kidnapped from their continent and enslaved in America.
In Catalonia there is today a very active network called the Xarxa de Municipis Indians, where we can clearly see that the discursive norms of white supremacy and hegemony are in very good health. In particular, I take the words of their spokesperson, Anna Castellví, in the introduction to one of their events: “we cannot judge history with the eyes of the present”.
Today, that the present continues to feed back on the past through ideas, discourses and practices that normalize the relations of domination of one group over another and that we continue to avoid talking about how industrial and modern Catalonia was built on colonized and enslaved bodies. Of how the very nature of the societies and the traditional practices of community survival were dismantled so that they would be functional to the rapid accumulation needed by the European economies and among them the Catalan one.
We are convinced that it is not a matter of judging, but of honoring the historical truth, of justice and reparation.
It is necessary to realize that often the discourses on heritage beauty and historical memory are not neutral, but want to impose a romantic and Eurocentric look to a phenomenon of oppression where it was not the “enterprise” what was really decisive, but the fact of participating in an unequal colonial context, in which the colonies were subjugated under laws, taxes, repression and bloody practices such as slavery.
How else could a poor man like Antonio López or a fisherman without resources from Barceloneta like Tomás Ribalta, in just a few years, acquire so much wealth that they were able to make loans to the Spanish treasury itself. This was only possible because they participated in a brutal traffic that emerged as a very fast line of enrichment with great profit margins at the cost of much suffering, pain and death.
We cannot judge history with the eyes of the present, but it is necessary to recognize how the past affects the present.
To justify all these atrocities and for the convenience of all those who profited from slavery, the African was expelled from the frontiers of the human. To justify the violence in colonial territories and the expulsion of their natives from the European constitutional, political and institutional framework, it was necessary to feed exoticizing, infantilizing and submissive imaginaries that were born to justify the violation of the rights of the people of the global South. These are cultural imaginaries that divided the world into weak nations and strong nations and that still defend today that whites brought civilization across the seas and that the impoverishment of ex-colonial territories is only the fault of an innate “cultural” essence of their inhabitants.
A civil society with sufficient maturity and responsibility asks questions and demands answers; it does not wash its hands of the issue by arguing that “we are not responsible for the deeds of our ancestors” and closes the door to discussion.
Of course, it is not a matter of assuming things that have not been done, but of justice and reparation, of not looking the other way when today, the racialized and precarious migrant is not considered a legitimate member of the citizen space, while discrimination by color and ethnicity has been the first in the city according to the Report of l’Observatori de les discriminations in Barcelona in 2021. Faced with this panorama it is always important to remember that indifference to the suffering of others is the door through which the extreme right enters. Whenever we speak of historical memory we must do so from a perspective of reparation to human dignity.
This article was originally published in El Salto Diario, and specially sent by its author for publication in ALAI.
Translation by Internationalist 360°
INTERNATIONALIST 360° 