Zíngara (the last name is omitted because she is a minor) is 14 years old, has 11 siblings already married and dreams of being a teacher, unlike many of her classmates “who, at 15, have a boyfriend, have dropped out of high school and are already bitter.” , as recounted. Eight-year-old Naira wants to be a doctor, a footballer and a painter. Alegría, 12, also aspires to teach, and her classmate Carmen, the same age, sees herself as a hairdresser. They are all gypsy and live in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods of Seville, Pamplona, Córdoba or Alicante. Every morning, when they lift the blinds and walk down the street to go to the educational centers, they only see dirt, exposed cables, ruined houses, garbage, ditches, unsanitary conditions… A research project by the University of Seville and four other academic entities, called [J]itanaseeks a new formula to reverse this reality, that the degradation of the environment is not a permanent sentence, that the girls and their mothers own their future, fulfill their dreams, transmit their learning and raise their voices.
“I had to carry my son up the stairs so he wouldn’t get bitten by fleas. She protested, but they did not come to disinfect. I saw myself powerless ”, recalls Raquel Gabarre, who has spent 43 of her 50 years living in the Polígono Sur in Seville, a group of neighborhoods with the lowest income in Spain, according to the Urban Indicators of the National Institute of Statistics (INE), and where 50,000 people survive with an average annual income of 5,666 euros.
Patricia Amaya, 44, has lived for a little over a decade “in the worst block in the neighborhood” with a little girl whom she accompanied daily to school, avoiding all kinds of risks from the landings of the stairs to the school center. She is a cleaner and has worked 14 hours a day for five euros an hour and without insurance. She has managed to get out of that block with the help of that daughter she protected and who is now settled in Pamplona and with a stable job.
Both represent the majority of the population of Polígono Sur: workers, fighters and resilient. “There are more people here who take care of everything and who work than people who don’t. They make us believe that it is our fault, but it is a lie. The neighborhood has been deteriorated for 30 years and it should be illegal to live like this. It is subhuman”, assures Raquel Gabarre.
She and Patricia Amaya are also part of [J]itana, the project led by the University of Seville, financed by the State Investigation Agency (43,560 euros from the R+D+i plan Research Challenges with European FEDER funds) and with specialists from different fields of social and experimental psychology, sociology, teaching and nursing coordinated by Professor Manuel García Ramírez.
The program, as summarized by the main researcher, was born after verifying several fundamental circumstances: “Abandonment is indisputable and women are victims. They cannot be criminalized or considered guilty or required to solve it. We also note that security, political and participation measures fail because they turn their backs on the Roma community. They don’t identify themselves.”
In this way, the programme, which was not born exclusively for women, but they were the ones who got involved in the majority, is based on a novel premise: Roma participation and leadership to establish guidelines for action. “Women and girls are co-investigators. It is an alliance. We create a safe space where we all learn”, explains Daniela Miranda, a researcher from Boston (USA) who has settled in Seville after becoming involved in the project.
García Ramírez agrees in this symbiosis: “A 15-year-old girl may never have left the neighborhood. She builds her life from this depressed and deteriorated reality that leads to early abandonment of training and adolescent marriages. 70% of Roma girls in Spain drop out of school at the age of 12. “Girls don’t even consider their dreams,” says Marta Lajos, who collaborates on the project with Gaz Kalo (Pueblo Gitano), the Federation of Gypsy Associations of Navarra. “But they survive and we can learn from that resilience, from their strength, from the concept of family. There are patterns of a dignified life and that is what the project is looking for”, adds the main researcher.
The plan goes through a first phase of identifying the problems based on a formula called Photovoice (photovoice), a process by which program participants point out and record problems that need to be improved in their community through images. “They get out of habit. They stop seeing something as normal and become aware when photographing it”, explains García Ramírez.
The images give rise to a critical dialogue that has led to Yiló (heart in caló), a gypsy and academic group that allows people to take action. “Let’s do something. We have to start. May our daughters have their dreams”, says Raquel Gabarre.
Daniel La Parra, professor of sociology at the University of Alicante and a member of the project, explains that they face “invisible problems that are hardly talked about, not even in the academic world, or that, when it is done, the victims are stigmatized and The ability to observe and propose is not recognized”. “You have to change the governance, but the speed is very slow,” he laments.
The completion of the first phase of the projectwhich has obtained an extension, has led to the recreation in the Cultural Factory of the South Polygon of The House of Dreams, a reproduction of the gypsy home to which the members of the program aspire, with a bedroom where, despite the landscape they perceive through the window, dreams of the future hang.
In the living room of that ideal house sits Alegría, the daughter of street vendors who insists that she wants to be a teacher. “I like working with the girls,” she says. And she is ready for anything, to work and study to the end. She has the support of the family, as does Carmen, her partner, who is more shy, but also convinced that the early marriage that serves as a way out for many colleagues is not getting him anywhere.
“We listen to them, we create an environment of trust,” explains María Jesús Tejerizo, a program collaborator, to highlight the importance of this change in attitude. She remembers a very shy girl who began withdrawn from the project until one day she said: “I want to talk.”
The research has been carried out by the Center for Community Research and Action of the University of Seville (Cespyd), a Coalition for the Study of Health, Power and Diversity whose mission is to develop community action-research projects aimed at increase the well-being of vulnerable groups and ethnic minorities.
Cespyd is made up of a multidisciplinary group from the Sevilla UniversityInstitute of Public Health of University of Porto (Portugal), Catholic University of the Sacred Heart (Italy), Industrial University of Santander (Colombia) and Loyola Andalusia University (Spain).
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