El Ejido – a touchstone for emigration memory?

A very similar strategy of identificational conflation was used by Alicantean writer Enrique Cerdán Tato:

“Years ago you already experienced your lot. Then, as today, they shook you and they insulted you, like a negligible kind. You also arrived from the South, with so many Spaniards without means, and the French or Swiss gendarmerie did with you as they pleased. And look at how, with the remittances they made on your backs, […] the regime of the bludgeon built the fatherland. A fatherland that today prefers to ignore your memory. The sons of those that pushed you into foreign countries, are the same that toady are humiliating those that are coming from the South, from that South. But you go on without papers, without home. You will always stay an immigrant, even in your own bench; of course, on the other side, they will never stop to be a gang of men dissipating the fascist breath of their lineage.

Something very unlikely. That they don’t trick themselves.”432

Cerdán Tato let his description of the Spanish emigrant’s experience and that of the present day immigrants flow into each other. “Back then and now” the experience was not only the same, but identical. He further underlined the critical role of emigration memory by pointing out that the state ignored this memory. Thus, the author not only argued identificationally, but also, on a meta-level, reclaimed the importance of emigration memory in the debate on immigration.

However, Cerdán Tato was not writing in the context of the reform of the Foreigners Law. He was commenting on the incidents in El Ejido, a small town in the south of Spain, where in February 2000, not even two months after the new and progressive Foreigners Law had been adopted by the Congress, Spain experienced the most devastating xenophobic and racist riots of its younger history. After three Spaniards had been killed, the Spanish population of the town, which had displayed extremely xenophobic attitudes towards the mostly Moroccan immigrants working in the agricultural

industry of the town before,433 attacked the immigrants, assaulting their houses and organizing

manhunts. The police stayed inactive for a long time.434 Politicians and NGOs on the national level

reacted horrified and condemned the actions.435 The PP used the incidents to reiterate its calls for a

more restrictive Foreigners Law – and was again attacked for this heavily by the opposition and civil

society.436 As the events in El Ejido happened right after the adoption of the new law and directly

before the national elections in March 2000, for which the PP had made a change of the new law part of its electoral manifesto, it is impossible to separate the discourse on migration policy-making from the public discourse surrounding the racial riots as one feeds into the other. Hence, the arguments made in public discourse on El Ejido are crucial for understanding the development of immigration policy, as well.

432

Inmigrante, El País, 6.2.2000.

433 _{See e.g. a powerful essay by Juan Goytisolo on racism in El Ejido from February 1998, in which he compares}

the fate of Andalusian emigrants to that of present day immigrants: ¡Quién te ha visto y quién te ve!, El País,

19.2.1998. For this article the author was heavily attacked by local politicians, who declared him a persona non

grata in the county (See De la irredención de la provincial, El País, 19.6.1998).

434

See e.g. Cientos de vecinos de El Ejido atacan a los inmigrantes y destrozan sus locales, El País, 7.2.2000.

435

See e.g. Sindicatos, organizaciones sociales y oposición acusan al Gobierno de la pasividad policial, El País, 8.2.2000.

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In many of the comments in the direct aftermath of the incidents, emigration memory was used. In most of the cases, the specific local emigration memory of El Ejido or Almería, the county in which El Ejido lies, was used, as the following two examples show:

“One also tends to forget that before becoming the promised land for thousands of immigrants, Almería was also a province condemned to look for sustenance outside of its borders. As María Enriqueta Cozar explains, the Almerian exile had as its first destination the French colony of Algeria, although ‘later, it went towards America, mostly Argentina, and finally orientated itself towards the most developed

countries of Europe, as Germany, France or Switzerland.’ It is calculated that during the 20th century

some 400.000 persons left Almería, which kept the population practically unvaried during those yeards.

It was not until the second half of the 1980s that this tendency tuned around.”437

This description was very factual, quoting “facts” about the emigration history of Almería. The comparison and the consequences resulting from this were left to the reader to envision. A more directly identificational mode of employment, was used in an essay by journalist Joaquín Estefanía:

“Almería and El Ejido were in the past zones of emigration. Maybe the fathers of those crushing dors and windows of shops and huts, of those man-hunting immigrants from the Maghreb or hitting and trying to lynch the deputy representative of the government, felt fear in their spine in a German locality to which they came looking for work.; or maybe they were subdues to humiliations weakening

proudness in Switzerland or France. History repeats itself with different protagonists.”438

Both quotes are highly interesting, as they demonstrated how regional emigration memory was used, when the problem was perceived to be regional. That the incidents in El Ejido were discussed on more general, sub-national levels was exemplified by the following quote from an interview with Manuel Chaves, the PSOE-President of the Council of Andalusia:

“Q: In these days we have seen that the majority of the immigrants is living in subhuman conditions. Is this the Europe of the Euro?A: No. It cannot and it should not. I recall that the first time I went to Liège, at the age of 20, many bars prohibited Spanish immigrants from entering. Now that Andalusia has come to be a land of immigration, I wish that we treat the immigrants the same we would have liked to be

treated 30 years ago.”439

Here, the personal emigration memories of the speaker were used to convey a message that claims validity for Andalusia as a whole, not only for Almería. The use of a very personal memory thereby followed the pattern we have seen above in the debates of the Senate, giving the speaker credibility and expertise. In the debate, the problem was mostly perceived as an Andalusian problem. However, there were also comments that lifted the issue to the level of Spanish national migration politics as a whole. The PSOE-MEP Rosa Díez, for example, took the events as a point of departure to speak about the relativity of irregular immigration figures in Spain:

“’We are speaking of hardly 30.000 persons’, says socialist MEP Rosa Díez. ‘And that in a place that until , as if it were, four days ago, exported emigrants. We are speaking of a percentage that is five times

under the mean of the EU.’”440

437

Huyendo del desierto, El País, 20.2.2000.

438

El racismo de las mil caras, El País, 10.2.2000.

439

"Hubo pasividad de la policía porque el alcalde impuso su criterio", El País, 13.2.2000.

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The interesting point here was the temporal proximity Rosa Díez established by qualifying Spanish emigration as having happened “until, as if it were, four days ago”. There was no identification here,

but rather a form of connectedness between recent emigration memory and present-day

immigration.