Ghosts of Spain Page 52
Inevitably, in a country obsessed by history, the statute turned to the past to justify itself. The preamble contains a dozen dates stretching back to 1359. It also, however, planted the seed of future arguments. ‘The parliament of Catalonia has defined Catalonia as a nation,’ it states, while going on to recognise that the Spanish constitution does not define it that way. The statute became another of those Zapatero compromises that angered almost everyone – especially after the Constitutional Court decided to water down some sections. (The court reined in attempts to make Catalan the senior official language above Castilian Spanish and took away the region’s new powers over local judges. A hair-splitting decision allowed Catalans to claim they belonged to a nation, while stating that the claim had no legal worth.) Catalan nationalists blamed Zapatero for these changes – as if he was somehow meant to control the court – and claimed they had been tricked. Many of the other sixteen autonomous regions into which Spain is divided also got new statutes in these years, each one grandiloquently proclaiming the unique nature of the region it applied to. But the Constitutional Court’s decision on the Catalan statute was a high-water mark in devolution. There is little room to give away more powers without a rewrite of Spain’s constitution (except in taxation – where Catalonia eyes the Basque system with envy). The new PP government is, in any case, against further devolution. Indeed, as Spain struggles to meet strict public deficit targets imposed by the European Union, there is even talk of some regions handing back some powers. That seems unlikely, but it is reasonable to expect a long pause in the process of decentralisation and federalisation of Spain. It is just as reasonable, however, to expect Catalans and Basques to become increasingly separatist. With the doors to further devolution closed, that becomes the only option for those wanting more regional power. Opinion polls in recent years have, in any case, thrown up curious results. A poll in Catalonia in the summer of 2010, just after the Constitutional Court decision on the statute, briefly gave more than 50 per cent backing for separatism. The poll was not an impassioned cry for independence but, as the polling company itself commented, more a case of Catalans giving a laconic ‘Why not?’ reply. Just a few months later only one in ten actually voted for separatist parties in regional elections.
As politics became increasingly vicious in the era of crispación, Spaniards began asking themselves if something deeper was going wrong. In the round of newspaper, television and radio interviews that accompanied the launch of the Spanish edition of this book, I was constantly asked whether the ‘Two Spains’ of the Civil War had reappeared. My answers, I am afraid to say, were equivocal. Some days I said ‘yes’. On others I answered ‘no’. It was not an easy question. On the one hand, the rift between left and right (and, along Spain’s other main fault line, between centralists and regional nationalists) was stronger, nastier and more verbally violent than I had ever seen. So, yes, the Two Spains had reappeared. On the other hand, no one was about to pick up a gun and start murdering their neighbours for political reasons (except, of course, ETA). So, no, this was nothing like the situation before the Civil War. I was angry that I could not find an answer, for the book obviously invited the question.
It was not until the El País newspaper invited me to the Camp Nou football stadium to watch Barcelona FC play and then be interviewed for a slot in the newspaper that combined soccer with politics and literature that I finally reached a conclusion. With the magical play of Leo Messi (then accompanied by Ronaldinho and Samuel Eto’o) to inspire me, I pondered the ‘Two Spains’ question that I was inevitably going to be asked. The answer finally came to me during the interview which, this being Spain, was conducted over a meal that started at midnight and ended some time after 2 a.m.
The answer, it seemed, was that Spain had entered a new phase in its, admittedly short, democratic history. A combination of José María Aznar’s second term in power, Zapatero’s social changes, the historical memory debate, the train bombings and the bitter debate over negotiating with ETA brought a true end to Spain’s transition to democracy. During that transition Spain reached a historically extraordinary, and invaluable, degree of consensus. This covered everything from foreign policy to terrorism. Most importantly, it lasted long enough for Spaniards to build a new state, with a new democratic constitution and decentralised administration. The Transición, however, was not normal. It was, in fact, an exception in Spanish history.
In Zapatero’s first term the fig leaf of consensus was removed. Both sides played their part in the process. There had, anyway, been something false about that consensus – almost as if Spaniards, horrified by the past, were trying too hard to dissimulate the things that separated them. The gloves had started coming off during Aznar’s second term. His People’s Party, buoyed by an absolute majority in parliament, felt confident enough to tread a genuinely ideologically right-wing path. Spain had not experienced such a thing for decades. The Iraq war, which Aznar backed, definitively broke any consensus on foreign policy. The political left, for its part, broke the consensus that underlay the pact of forgetting by bringing historical memory, Francoism and the Spanish Civil War to the table.
The train bombings shattered any remaining consensus. Even terrorism, whether by Islamists or by ETA, now became open territory for party political warfare. In many countries this would seem normal. Who would expect opposing political parties on the left and right to agree on such things? In Spain, however, it was both new and scary. It was made more frightening by the virulence with which, once released, these differences were expressed by politicians and opinion-makers in the press. That, however, is the nature of suppressed debates. Like suppressed emotions, they burst forth with uncontrolled vigour when they are released.
This state of confrontation reflects the historical – perhaps, even, natural – tensions within Spain. It may well be permanent, though it will not always be as virulent as it was in the early Zapatero years. There is, however, one huge difference between today and any time previous to the Transición. Spanish democracy is solidly established. It provides a stage upon which the old battles can be fought without blood being spilt. So yes, the Two Spains are back. They never really went away. The difference is that, in democracy, their arguments can be safely thrashed out.
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Spaniards have now reached a moment of economic crisis, anyway, when they must worry more about the future than the past. That future no longer affects just the 40 million Spaniards who made up the country’s population at the turn of the century. For the first decade of the twenty-first century brought a social revolution that had little to do with politics and everything to do with a booming economy that needed fresh labour. Spain, a country with a vivid and recent memory of emigration, suddenly became a beacon for migrants from elsewhere. In a single decade some 5 million people arrived – possibly the biggest population shift seen in Europe for decades.
Carmen Tejada was one of the first to come, beating the rush by almost a decade. In autumn 1991 she flew to Lisbon after borrowing 2,500 dollars for a plane ticket from a loan shark in her home town of Pacasmayo, Peru. The extortionate interest rate was 20 per cent, or 500 dollars, per month. She had left behind her two children, Karina and Joey, aged eleven and thirteen, and a job earning 200 dollars a month working a sweatshop sewing machine. The following day she wandered down the white mo saic pavements of the Portuguese town of Elvas and tried to work out the best route across the nearby Spanish border. A taxi driver offered to take her all the way to Madrid – the same city where her sister Ana had been turned back at the airport and sent home to Peru a few months earlier – for 1,000 dollars. ‘But I worked out that I could probably make it if I just got on the train. At the worst, they might force me to stay in Portugal. I was very nervous, but when they checked our passports in the middle of the night I said I was a teacher who just wanted to do some sightseeing in Madrid. They let me through,’ she said. Carmen arrived on a Saturday. She found a job as a maid on Tuesday. Within three months she ha
d paid off her loan. ‘I only needed 100 dollars a month to live on. I sent everything else back to Peru. The money even put a roof on the second floor of our house there,’ she said.
Within a year her eight brothers and sisters had all made the same trip. Within three years her husband Fernando (who, scared of border guards, paid the Portuguese taxi drivers’ 1,000 dollar taxi fee) and her two children were with them. A middleman smuggled the children in via Germany and France. In all, some eighty people from her extended family came. ‘It was very easy for women to find work as live-in maids,’ she said. ‘The men had a more difficult time, but eventually construction took off and they too were working.’
Carmen was a pioneer, arriving in Spain just a few weeks after I had also returned for what would become a permanent stay. The country we both found was still racially and – barring regional differences – culturally homogeneous. For Carmen and her extended family it was an El Dorado. None of them would now consider going back – though, when cancer threatened, Carmen flew home to get a second opinion from a Peruvian doctor. Twenty years later she has Spanish nationality and Spanish grandchildren. She owns a small flat and a house with a little orchard in the countryside. Many of her nieces and nephews are studying at university. One has a master’s degree in marketing.
Hers is a tale that could be repeated by millions of immigrants. The drip-drip of new arrivals in the 1990s became a flood in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The number of foreigners living in Spain leapt from 2 per cent, to 12 per cent, or 5.6 million people – and Spain’s population jumped 10 per cent to 45 million as a result. Most came from Latin America, home to an endless pool of potential immigrants who already share cultural, linguistic and religious values with Spaniards. Some came from Morocco and Algeria. More desperate immigrants from Africa also arrived – often on perilous boat journeys to the beaches of the Canary Islands, where hundreds lost their lives at sea.
The building boom encouraged by the growing housing bubble (which, in turn, was a result of cheap credit available in the newly created euro currency zone) meant that those who arrived in the middle of the decade had pretty much the same job-seeking exper ience as Carmen. Many were working within a week of stepping off the plane with a tourist visa in their passport.
‘The reality of the situation overwhelms the provisions of desk-bound sociologists,’ El País commented as the total number hit 3.7 million, or 8.7 per cent of the population, by the end of 2005. A decade of continuous growth meant there were jobs for all. The social security payments of immigrant workers provided an unexpected bonanza for the state, postponing a looming pensions crisis.
A few years ago a friend in Madrid observed that, although he knew there were hundreds of thousands of immigrants in the city, he rarely saw them. ‘Where are they?’ he asked. ‘They are working – and saving,’ was the answer. But that was before the economic bust. In 2012 unemployment amongst immigrants is running at almost one-third. Along with Spanish youth (with 46 per cent of the under-twenty-fives out of work), they are suffering worst. Some are giving up and heading back to booming Latin America. Many leave still owing money to Spanish banks which gave them mortgages and then repossessed their homes at half the price – leaving them with no home but a large debt. Spanish law does not allow you to cancel the debt by handing the keys back. In a rare show of political muscle, Ecuadorean immigrants have turned on the banks and are currently trying to get a law passed through their home parliament in Quito that would prevent them being chased for debts if they go back.
Spaniards claim not be racist. Many genuinely are not. Indeed some immigrants may not have counted on Spaniards being so nosily welcoming. ‘¡Bebé bien!’ ‘Baby fine!’ is the scowling, hurried answer given by the young Chinese mother who runs our corner shop. She is interrogated on a daily basis by dozens of clients who insist on asking about her new-born infant. This is one of five Chinese-run shops to have appeared on just four blocks of our street in half a dozen years – along with three grocery stores owned by Pakistanis or Ecuadorians. The former are immeasurably better than the poorly stocked Spanish mom-and-pop stores that preceeded them. And all open late into the night. Madrid, and especially its restaurants, has become immeasurably better because of them.
Spaniards often explain that the memory of emigration is still vivid here, and this explains why racism has failed to take a hold. José Andrés Torres Mora recalls how his father, a migrant worker, had wept and begged before a German consul after being told he must return to Malaga to get his papers – a place he could not afford to travel back to. ‘It is believed that about a third of Spaniards who emigrated to Germany went without papers,’ he wrote in El País as a debate began to rage about how many immigrants in Spain were there illegally. ‘In the sixties, after a civil war and twenty-five years of dictatorship, some 2 million Spaniards had to emigrate, and many did so illegally.’
Any visit to a first division soccer stadium reveals, however, that casual racism is rife. Black players are routinely greeted by racist chants. I heard ‘Monkey! Monkey!’ being hurled at Real Madrid’s Brazilian defender Marcelo Vieira on a recent visit to Atlético de Madrid’s Vicente Calderón stadium. My Atlético-supporting elder son hung his head in shame. Perhaps his generation will desist.
Overt racism is beginning to show its face elsewhere too. Proof of its existence can be found, for the moment, in smallish items in the local news: a racist mugging; an attack on an immigrant girl; or racist insults from police officers. I have yet to see a police officer of non-Spanish origin, though the armed services has recruited vigorously amongst immigrants. In simple terms, that means they can die for Spain but cannot tell Spaniards what to do.
Racism is also slowly creeping its way into political discourse – even if it remains far behind the levels shown in other European countries from Scandinavia to Italy. It is not surprising that this should have happened first in Catalonia. In a region where defence of identity is a largely unquestioned part of mainstream politics, the arrival of people from other religions and cultures was always going to present a bigger challenge than elsewhere. Nor is it surprising that Vic, the romantic heartland of Catalonia, should be at the centre of it. In municipal elections in 2007, an openly xenophobic and anti-Muslim party, Plataforma per Catalunya came second in Vic. Interestingly, although its founder had a past as a pro-Francoist Spanish nationalist, it defined itself as an ‘identity’ party. It even called its junior wing ‘Identity Youth for Catalonia’.
By the time regional and town-hall elections were held in 2010 and 2011, race had become a major question in Catalonia – and was just beginning to appear in other parts of the country. A Catalan People’s Party politician, Xavier García Albiol, suggested some Romanian gypsies be run out of his home city of Badalona – and was voted in as mayor. The nationalists from Convergència i Unió, meanwhile, wanted to introduce a points system that would see those who learned to speak Catalan more likely to win permanent residency rights. All parties, except those on the far left and the separatists of Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, embarked on a pursuit of the burqa and face veils – even though few were to be found on the streets.
Perhaps the most absurd example of this was in Tarrés, a delightful little village just a few miles from the Cistercian monastery at Poblet. With just 108 inhabitants, Tarrés has no Muslim inhabitants, but that did not stop parish councillor Daniel Rivera from tabling a debate on banning burqas and face-covering niqabs from the handful of municipal buildings – basically the town hall and the swimming pool – in 2010. ‘It’s true that there are no Muslims living in the village now, but this would be a preventive measure in case they come,’ he said when we met in the nearby provincial capital of Lleida. Rivera’s xenophobic Partit per Catalunya was a breakaway from the Plataforma party in Vic. No one was quite sure how he got elected to the Tarrés council – as he did not live there – and, in the end, the village refused to debate his idea. ‘Not so long ago all the old women in Tarr�
�s wore head-scarves too, but they have disappeared without anyone banning them,’ said a local waiter, Arnau Galí. ‘The problem here has always been emigration, not immigration.’ But Lleida formally passed a ban that year, with women found wearing burqas in publicly owned buildings liable to fines of up to six hundred euros. Socialist mayor Angel Ros insisted that this was progressive politics. ‘This is about equality between men and women. The burqa and the niqab are symbols of the political use of a religious dogmatism that had begun to appear in Lleida,’ he told me, referring to a fundamentalist imam, Abdelwahad Houzi, who was stirring things up in a city whose Muslim population had reached 21 per cent. ‘This is not Islamophobia. When the right does this it is guided by xenophobia, but we are guided by equality,’ Ros insisted. In fact he seemed more guided by a race amongst local politicians to be the first to impose a ban. Soon these were being slapped into place across the region – from Barcelona to Tarragona.
On Lleida’s Nord street, home to Houzi’s mosque and a smattering of halal butcheries, Abderrahim Boussira, an Algerian who ran the Western Union store from which immigrants sent money home, said the fuss was disproportionate to the problem. ‘I’ve been here twenty years and I have never seen a woman in a burqa,’ he said. But Khadija Rabhi, an elegant, Moroccan-born shop owner with her hair in a hijab headscarf, said there were a few burqa wearers. ‘Some are Spanish converts. The Qur’an says we should dress modestly. But people have different interpretations. I wear a headscarf, and if I was not allowed to wear it, I would prefer to move to Morocco – even though Lleida has always been my home.’