At mid-morning there is a lot of bustle at the Paiporta mosque. About twenty people drink coffee while taking a break from daily cleaning tasks; Others cut their hair, taking advantage of a volunteer offering free cuts and shaves. They are neighbors from the surrounding area, Muslims and non-Muslims, sharing tiredness but also laughter and informal chats in the midst of the disaster that surrounds them.
“Gratitude, affection, love, are the things that ultimately push people to get out of this crisis. That has been the best response to all the hoaxes and hate speech that have been generated on social networks” , explains Boutaina El Hadri convinced, vice president of Casa Morocco, in the middle of a thank-you snack offered by the organization to the 102 volunteer firefighters of the African country, who since November 13 have been helping in emergency tasks.
The scene at the Paiporta mosque is repeated in other places in the city. In an Indian restaurant that no longer offers service due to damage caused by DANA, a Sikh people group They prepare to distribute fresh food. The flow of neighbors is constant, each one grabs what they need, without excesses and always asking if they can bring one thing or another. “Here people hug me. And many people from my country who have not come as volunteers call me to tell me that they are proud of what I am doing, the message is reaching many places,” explains excited Amrik Singh, a Sikh volunteer, who He has lived in Girona for 20 years and has mobilized to go help Valencia since November 3. Using social media, Singh has managed to get almost 300 volunteers will arrive in the area in these weeks. “If we all come and pick up even a little mud with our hands, everything will be cleaned,” he says.
Like the Sikh community, thousands of young people from all over Spain have mobilized to Valencia to help with the most complicated tasks. “We arrived from class, and we said ‘we have finished exams’, so we are going to give each other a hand,” says César Criado, 19, who traveled with his cousin from Madrid and helps clean a school in the neighborhood of Raval de Algemesí, one of the neighborhoods poorest and excluded from the locality. Next to them, two other young Honduran volunteers who live in a town in Valencia not affected by DANA, smile shyly as they explain that their own experience with disasters of this type in their countries of origin made them want to come and help in any way they could. .
Although the reality in the affected areas consists of collaboration and solidarity, the increase in hate speech towards the foreign population, especially by extreme right groups, taking advantage of the crisis caused by DANA, along with the intensification of police presence in some areas, has generated a climate of fear among migrants and racialized people. Many of them fear abuse or deportations, which sometimes prevents them from reporting disappearances or asking for help, explains Candombé social educator Torres.
“If you have a criminal record or do not have documentation, and the police stop you, you go directly to the cell. They are registering and detaining mainly migrant people,” says Gastón Ariel Rivero, an Argentine resident in Valencia, lamenting how migrants, particularly undocumented, face arbitrary searches. Rivero emphasizes how migrants lived especially with fear in the first days after DANA.
To this, the Ministry of the Interior responds that migrants can access civil protection aid for the municipalities affected by DANA. Information is disseminated through official channels, and there are 22 temporary offices in the affected areas to facilitate processing. These resources and public aid are not accessible to people in an irregular situation. Furthermore, the Foreign Identity Card (TIE) cannot be renewed in these offices either, as it requires the intervention of the National Currency and Stamp Factory.
Fear is palpable among migrants of the affected areas. Many of them did not want to be interviewed for this report or avoided giving their names for fear of being identified. However, Adam (he preferred not to share his last name), a young man from the neighborhood involved in the reconstruction efforts from Alcosa Park in Alfafar, assures: “The hate speech that appear on television, newspapers and social networks, are very far from those of us who live in the neighborhood.
One more in the disaster but without the same rights
“It has been very hard, I I wanted to help but I couldn’tI heard so many people asking for help, a lot of screams, what a shame, really, but you couldn’t do anything. I spent six days away from home because I was at risk of collapse, without water, without electricity, very hard, but we all have different stories, just as hard.” Satvinder Kaur, a resident of the town for 22 years and originally from India , thus explains how he lived through the worst hours of DANA from his home in Paiporta, one of the municipalities at ground zero of the disaster.
Satvinder Kaur: “It has been very hard, I wanted to help but I couldn’t”
Almost 10% of the population in the areas affected by DANA, according to INE data, are migrants, like Satvinder, who has lost his business and two cars. The Horta Sud of Valencia, the epicenter of the disaster, is largely made up of working-class populations and has large agricultural areas. The migrant population rate in the area is high, partly because housing is more affordable and also because of the job options available.
In all these calculations, all those people in an irregular administrative situation who also live in those municipalities are not reflected. Only in the province of Valencia are between 43,000 and 47,000 people, according to estimates by the porCausa Foundation. And a migrant who does not yet have his or her documents is often forced to accept precarious work without a contract. Low salaries and job instability force these people to share housing and even a room to be able to cover expenses.
“The aid They should be for everyone but in practice the requirements are unaffordable for a person in an irregular administrative situation who, for example, does not have a rental contract because they live in rooms or are not registered in the municipality where they reside and many times they cannot even have a bank account,” he explains. Mariam Narváez, of the Woman for You Associationwhich works in Valencia with migrant women in irregular conditions and has at least 350 of its users affected by DANA.
“The Generalitat only accepts one application per home, even if several migrants live together in many apartments. We ask for answersbut we do not receive them,” denounces Eugenia Torres, social educator at the Candombe Association, referring to migrants in an irregular situation who are left out of public aid.
Furthermore, many workers in essential positions – such as domestic workers or caregivers – are migrants in an irregular administrative situation. “Many have lost their cars to be able to get around, they have lost their jobs because the employers have directly told them not to return because they are in the same situation, they can no longer employ them and they fire them,” explains Narváez about the situation of the workers with whom the Asociación Mujer Por Tí has contact after DANA.
Esperanza Ospina works without a contract in the area of elderly care and the day of DANA was the difference between life or death for the person she cared for. After almost three years of being in Spain, she hoped to regularize her situation, but the disaster has left her in a situation of uncertainty without knowing when you will be able to get an appointment with Immigration or a lawyer. His immigration status is limited to a registration and a Digital Identification Code (CID), but he lacks a NIE, which prevents him from accessing basic rights.
These workers, not having employment contracts, They do not have the option to be unemployed and they cannot access aid either.. Many of these women are heads of families, and without financial resources or income of any kind, the situation becomes extremely serious in an emergency context like the current one.
“The afternoon of DANA I was working in a flower shop in Alfafar, when I left I went into a doorway and I couldn’t get home until five in the morning when the water went down a little. The next day I didn’t go to work for logical reasons. “I didn’t have a cell phone, I hadn’t slept, everything was wet, my daughter wasn’t at home (…) and on Thursday when I returned to work they fired me,” says Eduardo Hosta, a Uruguayan migrant in irregular administrative situation and a resident of Catarroja, another of the affected municipalities.
Eduardo is fired, without compensation and without paying him for the extra hours worked. Her Spanish co-worker, however, was able to take advantage of the extraordinary ERTE approved by the Ministry of Labor after DANA. Eduardo has not stopped working since he arrived in Spain with his family for more than two years, and is looking forward to regularizing his situation. On the same day, DANA went in the morning to present his documentation for roots for training to the immigration office and is now waiting for a response. “The only positive thing about this whole situation is that due to the emergency they are not charging administrative fees to those affected,” he shares with resignation.
Tragedy does not discriminate in destruction but it does in its reconstruction. Thousands of neighbors are invisible to the state and the administrations, but they are not in their communities; where they live and work, despite not having the documents that recognize them as full citizens. The regularization of the more than half a million migrants who live in Spain in these conditions is the only possible way to leave no one behind, neither in a catastrophe like DANA, nor in what comes after.
And despite everything, Roxana Elizabeth Ulloa, Argentine, a resident of Paiporta for only a few months, when she thinks about the future beyond DANA she has no doubts: “I’m waiting for give us the papers, I want to buy a business here and stay in Paiporta”.
With the collaboration of José Bautista, Pablo Fernández and Víctor Pool (Migrant Power).
*The Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration and the Ministry of Labor and Social Economy did not respond to any of the questions posed by this means. The town councils of Alfafar, Algemesí, Picanya, Paiporta, Catarroja and Massanassa did not respond either. The Benetússer council is the only one that responds to the questions of this medium and affirms that it is preparing a municipal aid package that “will greatly facilitate the situation of migrants, both in a regular and irregular situation.”
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