From behind her counter at the laundromat, María José Gómez watches los chicos (the boys), as they are called here, amble to and from their home in a hotel at the edge of her sleepy town.
Though she doesn’t know any of their names, she knows each of their 130 faces. “That one is new,” she says, pointing to a slender figure in a hoodie, a notebook tucked under his arm and headphones swinging.
Many just barely adults, these men have fled war zones and persecution in countries like Mali, Senegal, and Nigeria before landing in Monterroso, a run-of-the-mill Galician town of some 3,600 residents in northwestern Spain.
Why We Wrote This
A story focused on
Immigration is a controversial topic all over Europe. In one small Spanish town, locals are finding it hard to integrate African asylum-seekers, but small steps to include them in town life are having a positive effect.
When the asylum-seekers began arriving here last fall, the media at home and abroad hailed the town as a model of inclusion. The soccer team and cultural center opened their arms, organizing clothing drives and traditional music classes for the newcomers.
Nine months later, the picture is less clear. While a few locals have welcomed their new neighbors, many see little reason to engage with the migrants, who tend to stick to themselves. Some locals, including the mayor, oppose the settlement project entirely.
Erika Page/The Christian Science Monitor
“We should be more open,” says Ms. Gómez between customers, business slow as usual. “We say we are, but in reality, no. Change is scary.”
The town has become a microcosm of the tensions brewing across Europe over immigration. While Spain has a reputation for integrating newcomers more easily than other European countries, places like Monterroso are just starting to grapple with what demographic change really means for their communities.
“We’re seeing a very strong nativist backlash in Europe,” says Eva Fortes, director of the EU-project-focused consultancy firm Project Arc, who recently completed her Ph.D. on immigrant inclusion at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona.
While there are no secret formulas for social cohesion, Dr. Fortes adds, “If we can find a way to recognize the humanity of each person who is living together with us in society, that goes a really long way.”
“Friends in the hotel, not outside”
Most residents of Monterroso can trace their ancestry back to great-grandparents or further in this land of rolling hills, where it rains for weeks on end without anyone batting an eye. Until the migrants’ arrival, the most newsworthy event here was a monthly agricultural fair.
So it was a surprise for local people to find that their town had been chosen as the site of a new migrant center, run by the nonprofit organization ONG Rescate. To most residents, the migrant crisis was something happening far away, in images of crowded boats landing on the shores of Spain’s islands and coasts, where migrant services are overwhelmed.
That is part of the problem that the Monterroso center, funded by the national government, is trying to solve.
Erika Page/The Christian Science Monitor
The migrants live six to a room in a gray hotel on the main road passing through the town, leased by ONG Rescate. As they wait for their asylum cases to be processed, the asylum-seekers take Spanish classes at a former store across the street, also run by the nonprofit. A handful of the migrants work at jobs they’ve found on nearby farms or in workshops, and some are in vocational training in nearby cities. But jobs here are scarce, even for locals.
“I came to Spain to work,” says Daby, an asylum-seeker in his mid-20s who withheld his last name because of a sensitive situation in his native Mali. “In Monterroso, there is no work.”
He says it has been difficult to connect with people in the town, in part because his Spanish is still elementary. “I have friends in the hotel, not outside,” he says.
While Galicia is one of the wealthiest regions in Spain today, some locals are concerned there is no room for the newcomers. “There are so many of them, and there aren’t many resources in the town,” says Ms. Gómez.
Others complain that it takes longer now to get an appointment at the local health center, while some worry about how the new migrants will live in the town if their subsidies run out. But few are willing to speak publicly, not wanting their small businesses to be affected by negative comments.
Some comments reveal underlying prejudice, with townspeople saying it had been easier to welcome the Latin Americans who live here than to welcome these new African migrants. In hushed tones, one shopkeeper says the town is not ready for so many people of color.
“It’s hard to find accommodation here, because they don’t like renting to Blacks,” says a migrant from Nigeria, leaning against the wall of the hotel. He declined to give his name due to sensitive situations at home.
Erika Page/The Christian Science Monitor
Compared with countries like the United States and the United Kingdom, mass immigration is relatively new to Spain. As the immigrant population (which includes citizens of other European Union countries) has grown from 5% of the population in 2000 to nearly 20% today, so too has pushback. Close to a third of Spaniards say immigration is the biggest problem facing the country.
“It’s nice to say, ‘We are such good people; everyone is welcome,’” says Eloy Pérez, mayor of Monterroso and a member of Spain’s center-right Popular Party. But he worries about settling 130 migrants in a town center of some 2,000 people. “If they want to preserve their customs, they can,” he says. “But we have ours, too, and we aren’t going to change for them.”
Yet change is coming. A new immigration law went into effect in May. It is expected to give legal status to 900,000 migrants over the next three years.
“We are going to need these people”
The situation in Monterroso is one of coexistence, not integration, says Catalina Trobat, director of ONG Rescate in Monterroso. “Obviously the idea for the future is that these people are fully included in society. But before that, there is a long path.”
Some locals are going out of their way to lay that path. The Monterroso soccer club organized a winter clothing drive and gave the migrants tickets to games and access to the pitch. A handful play on local teams.
“The most important thing has been breaking down the prejudices that existed,” says club president Balbino Martínez, adding that it is important for fans to see locals and migrants playing soccer together. “In small towns people aren’t used to this interculturality.”
Retired schoolteacher Elda Carril felt empathy for los chicos when she first saw them walking around town. She offered a few of them small jobs in her garden and asked about their lives, learning of their harrowing journeys here and the nightmares they have about their lives back home.
Last Christmas, she invited three migrants from Senegal for lunch and taught them to make traditional Galician prawns and fish in her kitchen.
Erika Page/The Christian Science Monitor
“I’m strange in this town,” she admits. “Most people would never do that.”
Having lived in Argentina as a young woman, she says the town could use a more open-minded spirit. “We [townspeople] are fewer and fewer,” she says. “We are going to need these people.”
Some of the migrants, too, are going out of their way to find their place. Most nights of the week, before his 10 p.m. curfew at the hotel, Hadi Gassama can be found at the Bruselas pub, wrapping his arm around locals’ shoulders and making jokes in determined Spanish.
“I always go out, always say hi to everyone. I meet people,” says the 19-year-old.
Few of Mr. Gassama’s new friends know that his father was killed by Malian militants, or that he carries the weight of his mother’s and four younger siblings’ future on his own shoulders. But that matters little.
“There are lots of people here who care about you, thank God, and I care about them,” he says.
Mr. Gassama is one of the few migrants at the hotel to have found a full-time job; he is saving up to bring his family to Spain – not by dinghy, but by airplane.
While his peers pray that they find jobs in bigger cities, Mr. Gassama has just signed a lease for his first apartment here in Monterroso. After all, this is now his home.
