What It's Like to Be an Ethnic Minority
I am affectionately called "el Blanquito" (or, "The Little White One") by my Latino neighbours.
Surely one of the chief pleasures of being an immigrant is having the natives view you with a sort of exotic interest, becoming an object of their orientalist curiosity. Foreigners in every country tend to play up their nationality to the throng, exaggerating the idiosyncrasies of their country to assert their identity, and this playful ridiculisation is likely the surest route to successful coexistence with the native population. For this reason I could never understand why a Pakistani moving to the United Kingdom would ever decide to throw down roots in Bradford or Southall where he can hardly be novelty to his neighbours, given that they likely came from the same village, or at least the neighbouring one, and where the assertion of his identity, personal, ethnic and national, must be channelled into other, more severe ends.
My own experience of becoming an ethnic minority in Spain has been quite accidental. The Spanish, for all the blood-mixture of Jewish conversos, conquering Moors and wandering Romanis, have turned out to be an ostensibly white people, and I would have blended in quite well if extreme (though temporary) poverty had not forced me into the Spanish ghetto.
Spanish cities, like many European cities, are divided largely into white, native centres and darker, immigrant outskirts where the imported, frequently illegal working class (and myself) are housed. I am permitted here at least to exercise my visible difference in skin tone, and am affectionately called el blanquito (or, The Little White One) by my Latino neighbours.
The Chinese here are less warm, and they have the upper-hand over the rest of us immigrants. While the majority of Latin Americans, chiefly from poor, politically unstable countries like Bolivia, Peru and Venezuela, have arrived in the last few years under the extremely loose immigration policy of Spain’s Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez1, finding themselves in situations of high precarity, the route for Chinese immigrants is longer and more established. Some 70-80% of them are estimated to come from a single county called Qingtian, in southeastern Lishui, Zhejiang, where the young dream of escaping to faraway Xibanya (or, España). The reality is that most first generation Chinese immigrants end up operating corner shops and bazaars, making their living by selling overpriced beer after the 10 o’clock alcohol curfew.
My landlord, like many long-term Chinese immigrants, has pooled enough money together to purchase property, and this is where he gains a distinct advantage — or whip — over the rest of us. If an immigrant does not have a visa, they must remain in Spain, supporting themselves with illegal, cash-in-hand jobs2 for several years before being allowed to apply for citizenship. My Chinese landlord is aware of my precarious situation and takes great pleasure in exploiting it, regularly visiting the property to psychologically belittle and extract money from me. I will relate one occasion:
You should first know that my Chinese landlord and I communicate in Spanish — his: broken, mine: close to perfect — and while there is little bonne entente between us I will not grasp the low-hanging fruit of writing out his imperfect speech phonetically so as to laugh at him, but will render it into standard English for the reader’s comprehension and my own moral edification.
During one of our twice-weekly flat inspections, my Chinese landlord began tugging at my bathroom sink. “Your sink,” he said, “appears to be a little wobbly”.
“I beg your pardon,” I said. “I did not quite catch what you just said”.
This was perfectly true. I will remind the reader that, though with hindsight I am able to produce clear dialogue for my landlord, the original message was communicated to me in a far-from-perfect Spanish.
“I said,” he repeated, “your sink appears to be loose. Have you been leaning on it at all?”
Once again I repeated that I did not understand what was being said to me, and asked if he would kindly repeat the sentence.
“Sink loose. Sink come off. Sink no good,” said my landlord, simply, not from any linguistic deficiency on his part, but in order that I might understand him. He continued shaking the sink which, I might have noticed, was evidently a little loose.
The reader will believe me when I tell him that I had no intention of provoking my Chinese landlord when I repeated again that I had not understood him. With this, he tore the sink off the wall in a rage, repeating, over and over again, the sentence whose meaning I was beginning to grasp.
He told me then that I was to pay him two-hundred euros for the damage and that, should I be unable to pay the sum, I should make it up by working forty hours in the kitchen of his cousin’s restaurant. All this I understood very well the first time around, as it was communicated to me through a series of slaps and kicks, a sort of private language which we have developed between us to discuss financial matters.
It is comforting in these moments to remind myself that some twenty years ago my landlord, as young man and a new and paperless immigrant, likely found himself on the reverse end of the stick, being beaten by an immigrant from the preceding generation. What he inflicts on me is just a fair compensation for what he suffered then. The thought is comforting, not only because it allows me to view him in a more sympathetic light, but because it kindles the hope that one day I will be the one wielding the broomstick, looking down paternally at the crumpled body of the fresh young arrival.
Sánchez has stated explicitly that immigrant labour is a means to prop up Spain’s welfare state and put the brakes on population decline. Venezuelans, for example, are often granted residency under the pretext of humanitarian aid. While Moroccans have no special advantages over any other non-EU country, they seem to be treated munificently by the Ministry of Education as a sort of apology for the Rif war.
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