The border industry as a system of enclosure.
“The pompous villager thinks his hometown is the whole world. As long as he can stay on as mayor, humiliate the rival who stole his sweetheart, and watch his nest egg grow in its strongbox, he believes the universe is in good order. He knows nothing of the giants in seven-league boots who can crush him underfoot, the battling comets in the heavens which devour the worlds that lie sleeping in their paths. Whatever is left in America of such drowsy provincialism must awaken. These are not times for lying comfortably in bed. Like Juan de Castellanos’ men, we must have no other pillow but our weapons—weapons of the mind, which vanquish all others. Fortifications built of ideas are more valuable than those built of stone.”
José Martí, Fragment from “Our America” (1891)
Fort Europe obstructs and violates the passage of deprived human beings from the Global South, and uses their bodies to exploit them. Meanwhile, it extracts its raw materials and rare minerals; coltan, lithium, water, fruit, grains, cocaine, gas or petrol. All this has eradicated any possibility of a decent life for people.
Fort Europe is built as if it were an oasis. Since 1492, Europe has exported a racial ideological order along with colonialism, that is still applied with greater violence in the Global South than in its own territories.
Colonialism is not a past event but rather a structural process, whose continuation and renewal we experience on a daily basis. Modernity and capitalism have refined its methods of destruction, exploitation and control in the name of progress, democracy and developmentalism, preventing the people’s autonomy and perpetuating the exploitation of their territories and their bodies.
This tour is both a protest against the walls at the border, in the legal system, and against cultural, institutional and economic walls. This tour is also a celebration of the anti-racist network in Barcelona, of people and groups who work every day for a better future for migrants. It is clear to us that the struggle for a dignified life for migrants means wellbeing for society as a whole. We believe that by defending the lives of people from the Global South, we call for the defence of everybody’s life. Here, we recommend a small selection of projects, which is barely the tip of the iceberg of the immense resistance we form.
Columbus Monument
We begin our tour at Columbus. The Barcelona statue is the tallest monument built in honour of Christopher Columbus in the world: 57 metres high, looking towards and pointing out to sea. At this gigantic monument towering over the port from where so many ships left for Abya Yala, we meet Valeria Linera, Chilean artist and teacher, and co-author of the short documentary film ‘Border Industry’.
Valeria invites us to take a look at the inventions that have turned borders into an exclusionary tool, bringing up the economic interests tied to them. We talk about the invention of the racial system. And fictions about the hierarchy of certain humanity, structured and sustained by Europe, in order to maintain its geopolitical, cultural, ideological and economic supremacy.
After this beginning, we go on to meet three organisations that carry out specific initiatives to improve, defend and dignify the lives of people migrated from the Global South in Barcelona.
Sos Racisme
An association formed in 1989 that works in defence of human rights through anti-racist action, in an independent, democratic and grassroots way. It has three main courses of action: the first is attending to and reporting instances of racism in all its forms and spaces, offering legal and psychosocial guidance to the victims. The second is political advocacy through institutional pressure to promote public policies that seek real social justice. The third is raising awareness and training through public protest, awareness campaigns and training actions.
Top Manta
Born in 2017 as the social clothing brand in solidarity with the Barcelona Street Vendors‘ Union. The brand was created to improve the living conditions of the street sellers’ collective, a project conceived under ethical and sustainable criteria, that guarantees the future for local communities instead of forcing them to migrate. They have helped to legalise more that 120 people’s situations so they can “give up their blanket stalls”. Top Manta represents a possibility for economic self-sufficiency and administrative settled status for part of the mantero movement.
The right to access to work is denied to part of the population, especially to manteros, who mainly come from Senegal, where Spanish extractive policies are endangering the possibility of sustainable economic livelihoods for fishermen. They end up travelling to Barcelona, often risking their lives along the way, only to find themselves facing the city’s dynamics of racial segregation and exclusion upon their arrival.
Més que cures
In line with facilitating access to work as a basic right in order to build the material possibilities of life, Més que cures (More than Care) is an association formed in 2018 in the Poble Sec neighbourhood, initiated by domestic and care workers to help them achieve decent working conditions. Més que cures is a co-operative non-profit organisation, ran by the carers themselves who manage and co-ordinate the whole process, thereby securing better, un-abusive working conditions. The association also offers support in bureaucratic procedures for new recruits who require administrative approval.
To end the tour, we travel to Zona Franca, a district built on Barcelona’s industrial port, behind the mountain of Montjuïc. Everything in Zona Franca is on a monumental scale: the avenues, the buildings, the bridges, everything is designed for cargo trucks to pass through transporting goods from the port to the warehouses and to the city. Right in the midst of this “non-human” scale is the Centro de Internamiento para Extranjeros (Internment Centre for Foreigners) where a colleague from Tanquem els Cies (Shut the CIES) awaits us to end our journey.
Tanquem els CIES
Centros de Internamiento de Extranjeros (Internment Centres for Foreigners). These are non-penitentiary public facilities where undocumented foreign nationals are held for a maximum period of 60 days. Since lack of documentation is an administrative offence, they are not formally considered “detention centres” but “internment centres”. However, they are governed by the Home Office, via the Police General Directorate, making them “extensions of a police cell”. For the sole reason of not having any documentation, a person may be deprived of their freedom and locked away in a CIE.
A CIE is a space where regimes protecting human rights are interrupted – a non-place, a waiting room revealing that the humanity of those migrating from the global south can always be called into question.
In the early hours of the 6th of January 2012 Idrissa Diallo, a 21 year-old youth from Guinea Conakry, died in custody at the CIE, Barcelona. Idrissa had requested medical attention since the afternoon but was denied it by officials. The outrage and indignation over his death prompted the creation of Tanquem els CIES, a collective working towards the closure of all Internment Centres for Foreigners, and end to forced deportations and the abolition of the “Alien Act” immigration laws and its entire racist and patriarchal legal framework.
We would like to remember those people, both adults and children, that remain locked up in the 280 CIEs existing across Europe. According to data from the Police General Directorate, in 2022, there were 2,276 people interned in the 7 CIEs across Spain. We wish to remember (http://www.tanquemelscie.cat/p/el-cie-mata_18.html ):
-D.M., 25 year-old man from Georgia “with anxiety issues” who committed suicide in Malaga’s CIE in 2022.
-A 40 year-old man from Colombia who committed suicide in Malaga’s CIE by hanging himself with his bedsheets.
-A 20 year-old citizen of Gambia who died of tuberculosis in 2005 at the Hoya Fría CIE, in Santa Cruz de Tenerife.
-Osamuyi Aikpithanyi, a 23 year-old Nigerian man who died in 2007 during his deportation on an Iberia flight from Madrid to Lagos.
-A 47 year-old man of Nigerian nationality who died in 2008 at the CIE in Valencia.
-Jonathan Sizalima, a 20 year-old youth from Ecuador who appeared hanged in his cell under strange circumstances in 2009.
-A Georgian national interned at the Valencia CIE and who died at the Hospital General de Valencia, of supposedly natural causes, in 2009.
– Mohamed Abagui, a 22 year-old man from Morocco living in Sabadell, found dead in 2010 at the Barcelona CIE.
-A.B., a 55 year-old man of Moroccan origin, who died in 2010 at the entrance to the Zapadores CIE, in Valencia.
-Samba Martine, a 34 year-old woman from the Democratic Republic of Congo, and mother of a 9 year-old girl, died in 2011 at the Madrid CIE.
-Idrissa Diallo, a 21 year-old youth from Guinea Conakry who died in 2012 at the Barcelona CIE.
-Aramis Manukyan (Alik), an Armenian 32 year-old man and father of a 7 year-old girl, who committed suicide in his isolation cell at the CIE, Barcelona on the 3rd of December 2013. Witnesses of the case who had reported that Aramis had been assaulted by the police in the hours previous to his death were deported before they could make a statement.
-Mohamed Bouderbala, a 37 year-old man from Algeria, who died in 2017 under strange circumstances in a solitarty confinement cell of a makeshift CIE in Archidona.
-Marouane Abouobaida, a 23 year-old man from Morocco in solitary confinement, allegedly due to a fight between inmates. An hour before his death he informed the director of the CIE in writing of the intense pain and discomfort he was in due to the wounds inflicted from the fight the previous day. He hanged himself with a t-shirt in a solitary confinement cell in the CIE in Valencia in 2019, just five days before his 24th birthday.
Thank you to everyone who accompanied us on the tour, for allowing us this space to remind ourselves that we artists are political agents within this unequal, racist and violent social system. Immigration laws kill. The CIEs kill.
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This Route has its germ in the collaboration with Santa Mònica in relation to the intensive programme of (creating) Situations and in the framework of the exhibition Time Machines by Toni Hervás. It has been devised and guided by Lumbre Migrante, a project on accompaniment and mapping in the process of landing in the administrative procedures linked to the immigration law. The project is promoted by Tau Luna Acosta, Diana Rangel and Juan David Galindo, in collaboration with allied entities.
