What is a fiction? It is an invented fact, a product of the imagination, something that is built in a certain space and time. And what is a person? It is a kind of mask or costume that gives uniqueness to a human being. It is everyone who through his imagination creates complex social, political, economic and affective networks to inhabit the world. Without humanity there is no fiction. We are circuses of the world. Jesters who make authority laugh. And authority, what is authority if not everything that seeks subordination?
I think of this while reading the Spanish Constitution that entered into force on August 28, 1978, within its Title I Of the fundamental rights and duties, in its first chapter, of Spaniards and foreigners, and, specifically, in its article 13, the following: “1. Foreigners will enjoy in Spain the public freedoms guaranteed by this Title in the terms established by treaties and the law. And: “2. Only Spaniards will be holders of the rights recognized in article 23, except for what, based on reciprocity criteria, may be established by treaty or law for the right to active and passive suffrage in municipal elections.
From the conception of the Spanish State, assumed as a democratic state, it is stated that, unless they are born Spanish or can obtain nationality by complying with the regulations established for it, all other people who live within the territory that it is responsible for, will lack fundamental rights and they will be considered of lower rank for the simple fact of not having Spanish nationality. The fiction that denies, that separates, that creates masks and acts accordingly for its own benefit.
YO.
It’s four past ten in the morning, Friday. I travel line five of the Madrid metro from Núñez de Balboa to La Latina station. The waiting time between one train and another is approximately ten minutes. I miscalculate, so I notify by courier that I will arrive late. Blame the Madrid metro. That subway, the pride of the city’s inhabitants, which has been offering an inefficient and increasingly deteriorated service for some time now. It is no coincidence that in this line many faces with the same color as mine are seen. Heads with black hair, long in the girls, a little shorter in the ladies. Let’s go, dancers from one station to another, coloring the landscape of trains, corridors and stairs. Masks of colors and different sizes that speed up and are part of the speed of Madrid mornings. That is why I am four minutes late in the neighborhood of La Latina, where I met with Adilia de las Mercedes, president of the Guatemalan Women’s Association (AMG), a jurist and teacher specializing in human rights and a researcher on femicide and sexual violence on stage. of conflict.
I run to the wooden gate and look for the number. I forget, so I take out my mobile phone to find out the exact address, until I see a thin woman with dark hair, the same skin color and about my height, touch the number I’m looking for. I immediately confirm that we are going to the same place. I have no doubt, so I want to break the ice and say something silly. She looks at me between puzzled and reluctant, but she smiles at me. They open the door for us from the intercom and we go upstairs together towards the office where we will spend the next couple of hours, talking.
II.
Two days later, in the south of the city, in the same rush as on Friday, I went to the Center for the Empowerment of Home and Care Workers (CETHYC), where I met Carolina Elías, coordinator of the Center and president of the Service Active Domestic, (SEDOAC). We know in advance that it will be a quick conversation, just to put a few points on the i’s, because on this occasion the important thing is that you can witness one of the workshops that domestic workers take, as part of the center’s activities.
Carolina, smiling and measured, welcomes me and asks me for a few minutes because she has to attend to the needs of the center. I wait for her at the entrance, which I assume is the main entrance of the building, and through which other women enter towards a room that faces me. Several of them smile at me, I know from their gestures that they are wondering who I am and what I am doing there, so I am about to introduce myself when one of them —I suspect that she is in charge of the activity that is about to take place— asks me if I am a participant of the meeting of feminist women. I don’t quite understand the question and I inform them that I am waiting for Carolina Elías, so they do understand everything and they tell me, with a Spanish accent, that my colleagues “domestic workers are in the background, somewhere else”. I accept my mistake and say goodbye.
III.
“The problem with the Spanish State is that it lacks humility, they do not want to learn from the speeches of people whom they consider inferior, they always want to reflect themselves in Sweden and Denmark and, well, it is probably true that these countries are the best reflection where Spain can now look at itself, because the fact that the extreme right has taken such a rise in those countries is an indicator of where it wants to go in terms of migration policies,” Adilia de las Mercedes tells me with that firmness and years of experience that characterize her as she tells me about Emilia’s asylum request case, to whom she gives a fictitious name so as not to hinder her legal asylum request process and with whom I have already exchanged a few sentences that allows us to establish a relationship of equal conditions to the exercise the word
As the conversation progresses, all of us present at the table take it for granted that the foreign person who seeks to exercise their rights within Spain needs to dismantle the stereotype of inferiority and inequality that the Spanish constitution itself highlights. The fish that bites its own tail: so that we can grant you a space for citizen representation, you have to learn to represent yourself, not as you are, but as we need you to be, to be part of the fiction that has been created.
In the case of domestic and care workers, the problem is similar, the demand for their labor rights has a long journey, which starts from the same facts: there are employers who look at Latin American workers with a dehumanizing bias. In that art activity of which I am a witness, I can hear them tell how it is that they once had to face facts such as that they thought they did not know how to use a bathroom, or make them work more than sixteen hours a day continuously, with shifts without days off, or require them to take care of children in exchange for contracts in which it is established, informally, that they cannot exercise their right to family reunification with their own children, because they would not be able to do his job. The fiction that the Spanish State creates around this dehumanization is that they all have to earn the right to live in a better place than the one from which they come. “Where are you going to live better than in Spain? That’s why you want to come live here. That is the position that institutions and society have. And then Spain becomes the prison of a huge number of people. People feel like prisoners.” He explains about the asylum policy or the condition that is required to request to regularize immigration papers through roots, because both have, as a requirement, that they cannot leave the territory, at least for the first few years.
IV.
According to the theories of fiction, in every narrated story there must be verisimilitude. Paul Maurette, in his book Why do we believe stories? (Clave Intelectual, 2021), explains that verisimilitude “helps direct attention to the internal universe that the work opens (…) something plausible, it seems true.” Within the world of law, something similar happens, the states of law are built according to a story that seems or pretends to be true, even though it is not. Democracy, as a unifying European concept, forms the very verisimilitude of the rights that are intended and pronounced as universal and that, however, are denied to all non-European/non-Spanish people. There is no room for other truths, therefore, it is not plausible and therefore they are unknown.
Carolina Elías, as one of the most publicly recognized representatives of the struggles of domestic and care workers, understands very well the language she needs to use to be heard. Years of personal and community struggle have taught her the path she has to walk to advance her goals. Her speech is conciliatory. She usually adopts a calm and peaceful body language that gives confidence. I have heard her speak in different spaces and in most of them she manages to captivate. Carolina calls for empathy, to recognize the humanity of domestic and care workers and to give them their social and legal place, through the exercise of labor rights. The groups that she represents and accompanies have won some battles, but not all. Important things remain to be done and most of them are based precisely on the fact that, in order to materialize the possibility of exercising all rights, all migrants must be considered true. In that activity that I witnessed, I witnessed people, not characters, who were affected by so much violence that they were forced to remain anonymous, nameless. And they were not all there, there is always a need for those women who, due to their own material conditions or their migratory status, remain on the margins of the story so as not to be more vulnerable before a state that demands the construction of lies in order to be considered as applicants for the right to be people.
v.
“Practice and our own experiences show us that there are no greater perpetrators of false reports than the police, and these are facts that we should know about,” says Adilia de las Mercedes, who from her job accompanies women like Emilia, who, at her time, accompanies other women, both in Spanish territory and in their countries of origin and thus in an almost infinite chain. If it is the authority that creates a lie that affects and conditions the exercise of a dignified life, how are we going to break that fiction based on lies? Naming other fictions, others and others, until they are so true that the official Spanish fiction ceases to be plausible.
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