Emmanuel & John

My first moments in El Ejido have been cruel. Walking one of the roads through the greenhouses that surround the city I find a small bird fluttering in the gutter. It’s wing is broken. I pass it by, trying to put out of mind what I know I should do. After a few steps though I turn back, intent – but it’s found its way under the edge of a greenhouse wall, and is beyond my reach. I watch as it fumbles under some pepper plants and disappears.

My stomach knots a little.

At every turn there is more plastic, more greenhouses, I walk for an hour and still nothing on the horizon but plastic. There are 30,000 hectares of intensively grown vegetables here now, owned by some 15,000 farmers, and worked by upwards of 200,000 migrant labourers (there is no accurate count, workers come and go, shifting across southern Spain with the harvests – strawberries in Huelva, olives in Jaén.) Some of the workers are legal, they’ve arrived from eastern Europe, or have secured their papers from the Spanish government, but many are undocumented, lost between the homes they left, often years before, and a new home here, which they can’t quite reach. (My assumption that most illegal workers want Spanish residency is probably wrong, I would expect most just want to work and make enough money to live, and help support their families.)

And work is the problem – there is none. Besides being a slow time, a lull between seasons, production is down. Economic turmoil and competition from similar cheaper-run operations abroad is creating hard times for Almerian growers. This has been a small boon for illegal workers though, as greenhouse owners desperate to cut costs would rather hire undocumented labourers who they can pay less than those who can work legally. It shouldn’t matter, there’s a minimum day wage in Spain, there are laws, but who is going to complain when work is hard to find, and your position in society so tenuous.

My stomach knots a little more.

With this crisis too, El Ejido feels as if it’s falling to pieces, buildings are half finished, apartments empty, parks overgrown with weeds, streets strewn with garbage. The headline in the local paper warns that the opening of the new Corte Ingles shopping centre is in jeopardy – it stands incongruous and towering over the bus station, the main terminal for workers coming and going.

There is a clear line between the Spanish living in El Ejido, and the workers living amongst them. Thomas, a friend I’m working with for the week remarks that it’s as if the border fence between Spanish Africa and Morocco has floated north and blended into the city, still working to keep people apart. I respect that I’m looking in from the outside, I’m a visitor, but there is a palpable tension in town that is clearly about race. The few times I’ve been sitting at the bus station police have turned up, and from the dozens of people waiting have asked only Africans for their identification. There is a viciousness too – racist graffiti: swastikas, and calls to White Power are everywhere. As often as they’ve been crossed out, they haven’t.

Another knot.

During an interview I ask Spitou, the head of SOC, a local migrant workers union about racial profiling, and hate-mongering, if there are laws against these kinds of things. He replies that “yes there are many very good laws in Spain… they just don’t apply here.” It’s clear that the government is complicit with industry to keep labour cheap, and plentiful for the times when it’s needed, but it’s equally clear that they have no intention of making life easy for those who have come to do this work.

Thomas and I head with Cherif, an organizer from SOC to meet some labourers in San Isidro, a small town on the edge of the greenhouses. The first apartment we visit is empty but for one man watching television. He talks very quietly about not having work. He’s barely audible over the TV, and I have to move closer. What do you do? “Nothing.”

On the way to the next apartment Cherif warns of a ‘delicate situation’ – a month ago a dozen prostitutes from Nigeria arrived and claimed the house as their own. When we get there it’s clear who’s in charge. We ask to speak with Peter, but the women have never heard of him. We find Peter’s room, knock and peer in. It’s a space barely big enough for the single bed inside, piled with clothing and a few books. “Oh, him, he’s not here.”

We then head into the fields to the shell of a house stuck between greenhouses. 10 young men live here, the building provided by the church, but without water, heat, electricity, or even a working bathroom. Everyone is inside playing checkers, and while we’re watching I take a peak into a bedroom of bare mattresses and concrete. Most of the men are focused on the game, throwing pieces wildly around the board. The winner stays on. They don’t really want to talk, but Emmanuel seems eager, and we step aside into the makeshift kitchen. In the fireplace there’s a blackened pot slowly coming to boil over scraps of lumber. From what I can see the water can take all the time it needs, there’s not much to put in it.

Emmanuel speaks in broken Spanish – no food, no money, no work. Again – nothing. I ask him if he ever thinks of going home, and for a moment he is lost, I see in his eyes a look of self-doubt and what seems like maybe a little panic. He comes back though, and laughs – “No, I will work.”

As quick as Emmanuel is to tell his story John is hesitant. The whole visit he’s been sitting in an armchair outside the house, and I step back out to see if we can speak – he puts down the small dog he’s been grooming. He’s young, looks to be in his early 20s. He has good Spanish, but he answers all my questions shortly. Over the course of our conversation he talks of being in Spain for three years. Can that math be right? I try to get the story of his journey, drawing lines on a map in my head as he talks, but I have to stop at the Canaries, the trip passes beyond my comprehension.

I ask him about work – none. He figures he’s had two, maybe three full months of work over the past couple years. I’m about to ask “why don’t you move to Almeria, or the capital where you might have a better chance of finding work?” but I catch myself. How much better off would he be selling fake handbags to Spanish teenagers? Walking the streets of Madrid wearing a dozen straw hats at once, hustling oversized sunglasses and glow-in-the-dark beads to drunk tourists in the Plaza del Sol? Is that really what I would wish on him?

I bite my tongue. Knot.

When I began this I meant to spin that story of the bird into allegory – but no. These men have not bounced off a windscreen by chance to land here, the cruelty they are living through is a complex mix of forced migration, politics, money, and racism that adds up to a modern take on slavery. If you live in Europe, and eat vegetables men like Emmanuel and John (there are women too, just that we didn’t meet any this trip) have picked them. The money they generate only ever flows up towards the bosses of the bosses of the bosses, and Emmanuel and John are stuck at the bottom in an eddy of poverty that they have little hope of ever escaping.

Are cherry tomatoes and a cheap green salad in the dead of winter really worth all of this misery?

Knot.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 12th, 2010. It is filed under Field Notes, Solidarity and tagged with El Ejido, Food, Migration, Racism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.