Home Away from Home: Immigrant Narratives, Domesticity, and Coloniality in Contemporary Spanish Culture

By N. Michelle Murray

Home Away from Home: Immigrant Narratives, Domesticity, and Coloniality in Contemporary Spanish Culture examines ideological, emotional, economic, and cultural phenomena brought about by migration through readings of works of literature and film featuring domestic workers. In the past thirty years, Spain has experienced a massive increase in immigration. Since the 1990s, immigrants have been increasingly female, as bilateral trade agreements, migration quotas, and immigration policies between Spain and its former colonies (including the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Equatorial Guinea, and the Philippines) have created jobs for foreign women in the domestic service sector. These migrations reveal that colonial histories continue to be structuring elements of Spanish national culture, even in a democratic era in which its former colonies are now independent. Migration has also transformed the demographic composition of Spain and has created complex new social relations around the axes of gender, race, and nationality. Representations of migrant domestic workers provide critical responses to immigration and its feminization, alongside profound engagements with how the Spanish nation has changed since the end of the Franco era in 1975. Throughout Home Away from Home, readings of works of literature and film show that texts concerning the transnational nature of domestic work uniquely provide a nuanced account of the cultural shifts occurring in late twentieth- through twenty-first-century Spain.

• Language: English
• Publisher: UNC Department of Romance Studies
• Release date: Dec 28, 2018
• ISBN: 9781469647470

N. Michelle Murray

N. Michelle Murray is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at Vanderbilt University.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

GLOBALIZATION, MIGRATION, AND FEELING

AT HOME IN DEMOCRATIC SPAIN

DOMESTIC WORK IS DIFFERENT

IN 2011, Royal Decree 1620/2011 redesigned Spanish laws for the first time in 25 years to address domestic work issues pertinent to the country’s twenty-first century, globalized realities. Spain’s legislation of domestic work during the second decade of the twenty-first century, and, by extension, the immigrants who frequently do it, attest to the country’s recent demographic transformations. After being a nation of emigration for most of the twentieth century, Spain began to receive immigrants in 1986, once it joined the European Economic Community (a supranational political and economic entity that would become the European Union in 1993). These immigrant arrivals would effectively replace Spanish women, who labored in the domestic sphere, both at home and abroad as emigrant workers in richer European nations like France, Germany, and Switzerland. The new legislation thus reflects a panorama of cultural shifts affecting issues of class, gender, and nationality in twenty-first century Spain.

Contrasting with neighboring countries like France and Great Britain, which witnessed increased immigration from their former colonies and elsewhere following World War II, Spain’s transformation into a nation that receives migrants from around the world is recent. This difference shows the ways that Spain’s nineteenth-century history of imperial decline and its twentieth-century history of dictatorship, autarky, and isolation contours its cosmopolitan, globalized present. The updated legislation of domestic work in 2011 thus resonates with the adage Spain is different as this legal reformulation attests to the nation’s recent experiences with immigration, beginning in the late 1980s. Manuel Fraga Iribarne, minister of Tourism and Information, coined the phrase Spain is Different in the 1960s to lure northern Europeans seeking Spain’s fabulous beaches, flamenco, and sun. Yet, this saying has come to capture the difference Spain touted under Franco all while denying that it was an anomaly as the only European nation where fascists had won, in the Civil War in 1939; and following that victory, Francisco Franco remaining in power for four decades. While Royal Decree 1620/2011 reflects Spain’s migration difference, the law also demonstrates that domestic work is different as a singular type of labor that reveals the dynamic interplay of gender difference, coloniality, and global supply chains in democratic Spain.

Royal Decree 1620/2011 defines domestic work as, "[una] relación laboral especial [que conlleva] singularidades propias que explican un tratamiento diferente respecto de la relación laboral común" [[a] special labor relationship [which implies] certain idiosyncrasies that explain its different treatment with respect to more common labor relations] (Boletín Oficial del Estado; my emphasis).¹ The law envisages domestic labor not as mere work, but as a special relationship guided by an ethic of care and a singular affective relationship between employers and employee that distinguishes it from other forms of labor. Legally encoding difference into domestic work relationships, Royal Decree 1620/2011 specifies the home’s peculiarity as a site of social reproduction–having and raising children–entangled in national and local traditions as well as a site of financial opportunity and, hence, upward mobility for many poor and working-class women. The discursive appeal of the decree resides in its celebration of the admitted uniqueness of domestic labor; yet, its critics state that in practice, it is pernicious.² Insisting upon the difference between domestic versus other types of work, the legislation creates disparities that degrade the very labor that society often claims to extol since it reproduces the population and thus perpetuates the nation.

The legality of employing immigrant women as domestic workers encourages migration, especially from Spain’s former colonies, since citizens from these nations share linguistic and cultural connections with Spain. Yet, once these women arrive, they are commonly marginalized in service jobs that perpetuate social exclusion even as they appear to foster social integration. Indeed, the data on migration and domestic labor paints a grim picture of domestic work in twenty-first century Spain. In July 2015, the Barcelona-based feminist nonprofit Fundació Surt released the report Fronteras difusas, víctimas invisibles. Aproximación a la trata de seres humanos con fines de explotación laboral en el servicio doméstico en España. The report concludes that, la trata de seres humanos en el servicio doméstico está más extendida de lo que se cree [human trafficking in the domestic sector is more prevalent than what is believed] (Alexanian et. al. 28). Here the coerced labor and informal agreements ubuquitious domestic settings emerges as a problem that impinges upon workers’ rights. And while the government has yet to distinguish the nuances between forced labor as opposed to work exploitation, the report defines forced labor using the following rubric: las víctimas son obligadas a trabajar o a ofrecer un servicio en contra de su voluntad o sin su consentimiento válido [The victims are forced to work or offer a service against their will or without their expressed consent] (Alexanian et. al. 11).

The Fundació Surt report indicates that Spanish employers frequently exploit women in the service sector in far more insidious ways. Tania González Fernández observes, the most common violations of rights are the lack of days off, long working hours, sudden dismissals without compensation, non-payment, threats of reporting their irregular status … and … low wages (194). Moreover, of the 700,000 domestic workers in Spain, only 420,000 receive social security. These numbers seem to echo another statistic: that approximately half of all domestic workers in Spain are immigrant women frequently deprived of labor rights in violation of national laws if not international convention. The tensions between the dignification/denigration of domestic labor and the immigrant women who frequently do it sets forth a series of poignant questions about democratic Spain that I engage with throughout Home Away from Home.

The Domestic Workers Convention, a treaty enacted in 2011 by the International Labour Organization (ILO), seeks to protect domestic workers. The Convention recognizes that the domestic labor market is often one of precariousness and vulnerability. The first treaty of its kind, the Domestic Workers Convention guarantees the labor and social rights of the world’s 53 million domestic workers, the majority of whom are women. Specifically, the treaty gives employees the right to claim time off each week, fixed working hours, and a minimum wage. At the time of writing, only 17 nations have endorsed this treaty. Despite the tireless activism of transnational organizations such as the ILO and local groups like Sedoac/Servicio Doméstico Activo (Active Domestic Service) and Red de Mujeres Latinoamericanas y del Caribe en España (Network of Latin American and Caribbean Women in Spain), Spain has yet to ratify the Domestic Workers Convention. For Carolina Elías, president of Sedoac, the Convention proposes to conseguir que el trabajo doméstico sea un trabajo decente, valorado por su importancia y en igualdad de derechos que el resto [make domestic work decent work, valued for its importance and endowed with the rights of other forms of employment] (in Borraz). Despite the overwhelming evidence of the exploitation to which women are subject in domestic service, the Spanish goverment under Mariano Rajoy (in office from 2011-2018) of the right-wing Partido Popular (Popular Party, henceforth, PP) recently balked at agreeing to the terms of the Domestic Workers Convention. In a 2015 interview, Carmen Álvarez-Arenas, a PP legislator, ambiguously stated, No es que no se vaya a ratificar, no digo que sea imposible, pero hay muchas dificultades y habrá que seguir trabajando en ello [It’s not that it won’t be ratified, I’m not saying it’s impossible, but there are many difficulties that will have to be worked out] (in Borraz).

Home Away from Home centers difference as the organizing principle for an exploration of democratic Spain. Focusing on difference–the difference once problematically ascribed to Spain by other nations and the perceived difference of immigrant women in domestic service–enables me to construct a narrative of democratic Spain that focuses on those who are marginalized if not invisible. Critically examining literature and cinema about foreign domestic workers brings to light the fraught conceptualizations of progress and global imbalances in Spain’s democratic period. Scholars and critics increasingly debate these issues in post-2008, crisis Spain, where the Great Recession has ignited massive protests and a sociopolitical reconfiguring that produced new and relevant political parties. Part of this process has entailed questioning and critiquing the bases on which the Spanish democracy was instituted and the extent to which democratization fueled the marginalization of many citizens. Yet, a cultural history that investigates the entanglements of migration and domesticity proves that issues of exclusion and difficult assimilation were significant for some sectors of the population as early as the 1980s.

Cultural texts–ranging from scholarly studies to works of literature and films–that treat the topic of migration from the global south to wealthier nations abound. Domestic work and migration have been investigated together largely through empirical, social scientific methodologies. Literary and cinematic production modulates and deepens often chilling social-scientific findings of exploitation. While attending to the harsh realities immigrants customarily confront, works of literature and film can also envision assimilation through private means in privileging introspection, dialogue, and family storylines. Fiction and cinema thus operate as complementary discourses alongside legal and social scientific reports in Home Away from Home. Indeed, aesthetic, fictional works present economies of affect that show how inequality takes shape not only through the law and economic exploitation but also through emotional positionalities entrenched in discourses of power.

Home Away from Home plays on a familiar expression that evokes comfort, coziness, and acceptance. These characteristics contrast with the hostility migrants endure in their home away from home. Indeed, immigrant women find themselves marked as different within a culture that negotiates its own history of difference, along with a postcolonial angst that has been an undeniable feature of European nationalisms in the twenty-first century.³ The postcolonial moment is essential to this study. Home Away from Home examines what occurs when women attempt to reposition themselves within global economic hierarchies and often find themselves in precarious, risky work environments within Spanish homes. These difficult repositionings illustrate what Chandra Mohanty terms cartographies of struggle, spatial conflicts rooted in ossified classifications of both Otherness and space wherein concepts of race, gender, and national culture remain static despite migrations, decolonial movements, and globalizing forces that aim to restructure society; Mohanty dedicates an entire chapter of her book Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity to analyzing these cartographies (Feminism 11; 43-84). Throughout Home Away from Home, psychoanalytic theory–specifically regarding the uncanny and negation–complements discussions of coloniality to illustrate the intertwining of economic inequalities and attendant emotional resonances in the home.

Confirming the powerful contributions of literature to the understanding of society’s complexities, Sergi Belbel’s 2004 play Forasters [Outsiders] provides rich insight into migration and domestic economies as it sheds light upon the material, labor, and affective entanglements at the cornerstone of ideologies and narratives of home. Following literary theorist Fredric Jameson, who contends that a political unconscious is palpable in all texts, I conceive of the works under study in Home Away from Home not only as aesthetic pieces, but also as socially symbolic acts of an author embedded in an economic and historical reality. Owing to their textual enunciation of a specific social context, literary works like Forasters can also account for what Raymond Williams terms structures of feeling, lived meanings and values that are integral to people’s habits and worldviews and cannot be transmitted through quantitative or social scientific methodologies (133).

In addition to the distinctiveness of literature as a tool of social critique, the significance of affect to these literary representations of home is important. Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg argue the importance of affect to spatial relations: Emotions … unfold regimes of expressivity that are tied to much more resonant worldings and diffusions of feeling/passions–often including atmospheres of sociality, crowd behaviors, contagions of feeling, matters of belonging … and a range of postcolonial, hybridized, and migrant voices that forcefully question the privilege and stability of individualized actants possessing self-derived agency and solely private emotions within a scene or an environment (8). Regarding Spanish theater specifically, since 1985, some 40 plays have been produced in Spain in which at least one character is an immigrant (Doll 28). The immigrant presence on the Spanish stage is complemented by a normalcy in their depiction that diverges from many other portrayals of immigrants and Otherness rooted in identity-based conflict and intercultural strife (Doll 28, 33). For these reasons, analyzing Belbel’s Forasters alongside social scientific data in the Introduction enables me to provide an interdisciplinary account of the ways that immigration has shifted Spain’s social composition and domestic economies customarily depict broader cultural transformations and pressures.

SPANISH IMMIGRATION: 1986-2016

Immigration is a recent and extraordinary phenomenon in Spain. During the Franco dictatorship (1939-1975), Spaniards left their nation as political exiles and as economic émigrés. According to the Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas (The National Institute of Statistics), in 1981, immigrants were 0.52% of Spain’s population; and they were primarily British and German retirees who lived in the south of Spain and in the Balearic and Canary Islands. In 2005, according to Eurostat, the European Union’s statistical agency, Spain had the second highest absolute net migration in the world after the United States (Münz). And in 2014, immigrants formed 10.1% of the population. Population increases by nation of origin offer a glimpse into the demographic and cultural shifts that occurred after the dictatorship. In approximately one decade (from 2001-2014), Spain registered a 2,800% increase from Bolivia, a 2,500% increase from Romania, and a 500% increase from both China and Nigeria (Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas).

It is vital to note that migration patterns and international relations in Spain have witnessed unfathomable highs and lows since the dawn of the twenty-first century. Until 2008, immigration soared. Following the 9/11 terrorist attack in 2001, the United States restricted migration, compelling many potential migrants to opt to move to Spain instead. Around the same time, challenging policy trends in the E.U. and in the United States, the Spanish government, led by Socialist prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (in office from 2004-2011) granted amnesty to approximately 700,000 unauthorized immigrants residing in Spain (Fabián).⁴ This reform attracted more immigrants, and it also led to an increase in cultural productions about migration.

Since 2008, migratory patterns have shifted as a result of the global economic crisis that crippled the Spanish economy. In a 2015 report, the Organización Internacional de Migración (International Organization for Migration) pointed out a new trend in European migrations: as the Spanish economy suffered, Spaniards left their nation as emigrants seeking opportunities elsewhere, and Latin American immigrants in Spain returned to their homelands (5).⁵ Spain’s vulnerable economic position in the wake of the economic crisis thus tempers its heretofore full acceptance into dominant, Western Europe. The derogatory moniker PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain) confirms that certain nations remain situated on the economic and social margins of Europe despite a brief stint of continental harmony. Indeed, Spain’s own history of marginalization makes the marginalization of the immigrants who relocate there both an injustice and a point of solidarity, producing complicated viewpoints of intercultural social relations.

Notwithstanding the decrease in some foreign populations following 2008, numerous immigrants still cling to an admittedly elusive Spanish dream, particularly Africans, Asians, and Eastern Europeans. Romanians are currently the largest immigrant group in Spain. And since the onset of the Great Recession, African immigration has increased as a consequence of economic, health, and political issues plaguing the continent. News coverage of collective, desperate attempts to scale the Melilla border fence–a very high wall equipped with barbed wire and elaborate surveillance technology–and the tragic deaths of immigrants in pateras (small boats carrying unauthorized immigrants) illustrate the tremendous risks many Africans still assume in order to reach Spain/Europe. In Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, political theorist Wendy Brown observes that walling usually occurs at moments when national borders and boundaries are difficult to enforce. The walls in the Spanish enclaves in Morocco, Ceuta and Melilla, aptly represent the primacy of the border in materially and symbolically contouring nationalistic definitions. In 2005, when thousands of immigrants charged the walls, the government, then headed by Zapatero, built new walls and reinforced them to impede–or to appear to impede–later intrusions. Critically-acclaimed novelist Juan Goytisolo even noted that neither the wall, with its sophisticated video cameras, halogen lights, and sensory system, nor the highway from Morocco that is constantly patrolled both by the Spanish Army and the Civil Guard, nor the barbed wire fencing off Ceuta can deter the entry of migrants into this European threshold (in Nair 31). Effectively reversing the post-2008 decline, the 2015 refugee crisis has produced another tremendous shift in migratory patterns. In 2015 alone, the International Organization for Migration estimated that 750,000 displaced persons sought shelter in Europe. Along with other states located at the southern border of the Schengen area, Spain is often a point of entry through which migrants access Europe. While many migrants and refugees then voyage to other European destinations, some will certainly relocate to Spain permanently. In fact, 2016 was the first year since the recession (specifically, 2009) in which more people arrived in Spain than left, with 85% of the new arrivals being foreigners while 15% were Spanish emigrants who returned. Finally, regardless of fluctuations evident in social scientific statistical data, focusing purely on cultural analysis, immigration remains a pivotal indicator of the seismic shifts that have occurred in Spain since the onset of democracy during the 1970s.

The immigration boom punctuates and periodizes Spain’s Transition to democracy, a comprehensive cultural refashioning initiated in the 1970s.⁶ One of the most reiterated critiques of the Transition is its insistence upon silence and consensus that erode the very democratic principles it purported to institute.⁷ El pacto del silencio/ olvido (The Pact of Silence/Forgetting) is best captured in the Amnesty Law (1977), which granted amnesty to political prisoners and protected members of the Franco regime from being prosecuted for human rights abuses committed during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the subsequent dictatorship (1939-1975).⁸ The Transition also privileged consensus and discouraged political and regional difference in favor of a tenuous sociopolitical cohesion. Luisa Elena Delgado convincingly argues that the Transition’s insistence on an impossible consensus not only undermines democratic rationality but also propagates an ideological fantasy staunchly opposed to difference and Otherness (23-24). Democratization was thus encumbered by Spain’s past of divergent political ideologies and cultures. In an attempt to consolidate distinct national identities, Spanish policymakers who became the architects of democracy constructed a narrative that placed contrived memories of consensus at the center of Spain’s political identities (Resina 8). Legislators on the left and right literally sought to create a middle ground, which would function as the base of a far more complex and diverse political community.

The neutral, centrist conceptualizing integral to the Transition is embodied in the figure of Adolfo Suárez, the leader of the Union of the Democratic Centre and Spain’s first democratically elected Prime Minister since the 1930s. According to Isidro López, Suárez served to facilitate a smooth transfer of power that maintained the status quo. Suárez’s political career thus operated to garantizar un relevo ‘suave’ entre las élites, entendiendo por ‘suave’ que el cambio de los resortes del poder económico no generase movimientos demasiados bruscos entre los grupos que lo controlaban [guarantee a smooth replacement of elites, ‘smooth’ meaning that the shift in the resources of economic power would not generate brusque movements among those who controlled it] (López). Suárez’s election in 1976 represented a collective desire to ensure that Spain would continue as a democracy, even if it was one built upon alienating neoliberal rationalities of corporatization and privatization, collective silence regarding the past, and uncritical unanimity. This political refashioning also repressed other conflictive histories at this moment of the resurgent democracy.⁹ When migration processes began to bring new foreign populations to Spain from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, policymakers adopted supposedly new methodologies for dealing with difference within Spanish frontiers. As a multitude of critics have astutely shown, the aforementioned new strategies availed themselves of centuries-old discourses and histories.¹⁰

At a crucial moment when disavowing difference lies at the crux of a politics purporting to dislodge the dictatorial past, immigration perturbs the sociopolitical harmony intrinsic to consensus and conjures up unresolved histories of conquest and imperialism. For Susan Martín-Márquez, Even though the arrival of immigrants confirms Spain’s current status as a European economic power capable of attracting workers from nations that have not yet achieved ‘modernity,’ it also forces Spaniards into an uncomfortable confrontation with … imperfectly buried ghosts (314). Here, Martín-Márquez refers to Spain’s own painful history as a proximate Other for northern Europe, expressed in sayings like Spain is different or the more jarring French adage, fait commencer l’Afrique aux Pyreneés [Beyond the Pyrenees is Africa].¹¹

Spain’s marginalization presumably ends during the 1980s the nation is finally admitted into the European Economic Community. Spain’s entry, however, required that the nation formulate a legal framework to regulate foreigners, especially citizens from nations outside Europe, for the first time. As migrants began to seek residence in Spain to align themselves with a wealthy, powerful nation to gain access to capital, the nation’s previous contacts with Africa, the Americas, and Asia made it a feasible option for many outsiders who would ironically feel somewhat at home within Spanish borders because of shared language and culture.¹² Martín-Márquez’s reference to imperfectly buried ghosts, therefore, also invokes the colonial past Spain was loath to acknowledge as an important aspect of its democratic, post-national, globalized present.¹³

The Ley de Extranjería [Foreigners Law] is an umbrella term referring to a compendium of statutes enacted from 1985 (Ley Orgánica 7/1985, sobre Derechos y Libertades de los Extranjeros) to 2011 (Real Decreto 557/2011) in response to the real or imagined pressures of foreign migration. The piecemeal nature of the law reflects the reactionary character of Spanish approaches to immigration. The Ley de Extranjería is a patchwork of responses that shift according to economic climates, continental demands tethered to the supranational entity of the European Union, and political maneuvering by whichever party happens to be in power. While many critiques of Spain’s democratization scrutinize the Constitution and other laws that served to establish and consolidate the democracy, few, if any, mention the Ley de Extranjería or the explicit management of Otherness as quintessential qualities of democratic Spain. Kitty Calavita describes the Ley de Extranjería accordingly,

Despite what seems like constant tinkering, several themes continue to characterize these laws. Above all, they are oriented toward immigration as a labor supply and contain few provisions for permanent legal residency or naturalization … Those who are legalized … generally attain only temporary legal status and must demonstrate continued formal employment and navigate a maze of government bureaucracies to renew their permits. (136).

As Calavita asserts, the law primarily operates to institutionalize marginalization even as Spanish cultural campaigns continually pitch the importance of multiculturalism in the increasingly diverse nation (136).¹⁴ Much like the 2011 domestic work decree described at the beginning of this Introduction, the legislation creates official policies that undermine the stated objectives of a new Spain, complete with new inhabitants who live and work in it.

Domestic economies linked to migratory patterns manifest the ongoing tensions of coloniality. As Martinican theorist Frantz Fanon argued in Black Skin, White Masks, colonialism imposed a grammar and logic on the colonized that disfigures and distorts their collective identity and history. Despite the independence of once colonized nations, coloniality persists even in a supposedly postcolonial moment, and the distortion that Fanon theorized endures as a central feature of global interconnectedness. Nelson Maldonado-Torres differentiates between colonialism and coloniality in this way:

Colonialism denotes a political and economic relation in which the sovereignty of a nation or a people rests on the power of another nation, which makes such nation an empire. Coloniality, instead, refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labour, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations. Thus coloniality survives colonialism. It is maintained alive in books, in the criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of people, in aspirations of self, and so many other aspects of our modern experience. In a way, as modern subjects we breathe coloniality all the time and everyday. (243)

Scholars like Aníbal Quijano and Walter Mignolo use the terms the coloniality of power and the colonial matrix of power to explain the constellation of practices and ideologies that perpetuate the denigration of the once colonized through Eurocentric, nationalist, and racist principles. Colonization thus remains a central aspect of our postcolonial world, as globalization emanates from colonization, which cultivated much of the capitalist and racist relations that