PARTICIPATORY ACTION RESEACH: MAPPING IMMIGRANT LIVES

I’ve taken notes during several activist meetings, convergences, and personal conversations with movement figures over the past few months in Spain. I intended to post many of them here (like those from the city-wide gathering of grassroots groups inspired by the Zapatistas' 6th Declaration) but time just seems to pass too quickly. Since I'm sick and stuck in bed today, I decided to type up some thoughts from an excellent meeting I attended on Tuesday.

First the setting: The meeting was held in Miles de Viviendas, a six-story occupied social center situated along a major street facing the Mediterranean coast in Barcelona. Like the Ateneu Candela, Miles is home to many collectives, film screenings, workshops, etc., in addition to providing free housing for its inhabitants and weekly public meals that attract the city's scrappy activist set.

The room where the meeting was held was covered in posters from various campaigns and mobilizations. I was particularly drawn to a set of maps detailing various political developments, sites of conflict, the locations of notorious corporations and institutions, along with statistics related to patterns of migration, wage exploitation, environmental degradation and military expenditures. Apart from my attraction to these posters on an aesthetic level, I found them a remarkably effective way to visualize relations of power and our potential targets for action. They also remind me of some of the Situationist mapping projects back in the day that sought to redefine our sense of geographic placement and territorial agency. I've pasted a few examples below (click to enlarge), but you can find more beauties here.




The meeting I attended was hosted by the collective that gathers weekly to work on issues of immigrant justice. We discussed the April conference we're organizing in Terrassa (see previous post) and the demonstration taking place here this weekend in response to the arrest and threats of deportation against some of our Moroccan friends recently. But the bulk of the meeting was dedicated to the launching of a video and mapping project to profile the lives of Barcelona's diverse immigrant communities.

This initiative is intended to encourage participatory action research in the lead up to the second Europe-wide Caravana for immigrant rights and the freer movement of people scheduled to take place this summer in Barcelona. Unlike the first Caravana which brought some 500 activists to the conflict-ridden zone separating Spain from Morocco, the focus this year is more on the internal borders that separate and exclude immigrant populations within nations.

By interviewing a series of immigrants and working with organizations that represent their communities (some who were at the meeting and are active in designing its contours), the goal is to explore the "other city" that is mostly invisible to outsiders. The final product will include a documentary film and a map illustrating where different immigrant communities are populated, elements of their formal and informal economies, institutions they rely on or suffer under, cultural and religious meeting points, and spaces of conflict and mobilization.

We decided on roughly 10 archetypal "legal" immigrant and undocumented individuals to profile: a domestic worker, a child of immigrant parents, a refugee/asylum seeker, a college student, a sex worker, someone facing deportation issues, a retiree, a queer person enjoying the relative freedoms Barcelona affords, someone connected to the NGO circuit, a street vendor and someone who was a political activist before arriving to Spain. Pointing to me, someone joked about including an immigrant from the "corazon de la bestia", but the focus with be on African, Arab, Asian and Latin American (and possibly Eastern European) men and women.

A project of this kind, one that facilitates greater understanding and cooperation between Spain's native born and its newcomers, seems especially vital given the concerns raised by both the Paris riots and the ratcheting up of "us vs. them" rhetoric in the wake of the Danish cartoon rubbish. It's a process of critical inquiry and intercultural listening that is possible to replicate elsewhere with degrees of variation. And while addressing the persistent barriers and differences of language and culture, racism and xenophobia, wage stratification and social exclusion, we can also be supportive of those progressive elements within immigrant communities that are working toward greater gender equality, an appreciation for secular democracy and other matters the Left should never abandon.