Spain is undergoing a process of intense demographic change towards a more diverse society brought about by massive immigration over the last decade that includes a high proportion of Latin Americans. Pejoratively dubbed ‘sudacas’, they are moving in the opposite direction to the Spanish who went to Latin America 100 years ago. Multicultural Spain has two main facets: the historical regional minorities in Catalonia, Galicia and the Basque Country, elements of which have waged struggles for national autonomy; and the recent immigrant minorities, notably the Latin Americans, North Africans and Romanians.
Nadia de Cristóforis, ‘Políticas y prácticas migratorias: los flujos de gallegos y asturianos a Buenos Aires (1840-1860)’, in Revista de Indias (Vol. LXVII, no. 244, 2008), p. 88. The historian Raymond Carr, in his excellent history of modern Spain, wrote that, at the end of the nineteenth century and start of the twentieth, the Spanish economy was ‘an underdeveloped economy, less prosperous than that of its old colony Argentina, a country that the poverty-stricken peasants who could barely find work in Spanish industry saw as a land full of promise’ (España: de la restauración a la democracia, 1875-1980 (Barcelona, Ariel Historia, 2008; first published in 1980), p. 50).
2.
Carr, ibid., pp. 38-40.
3.
Emilio Cazalá , ‘Inmigrantes españoles y las remesas a España’, El País ( Montevideo, 22 June 2009), p. A14.
4.
Consuelo Rumí, ‘Entrevista en Crónicas de la emigración’ ( Galicia, 16 July 2009), available at: http://www.cronicasdelaemigracion.com.
5.
Author’s compilation based on official census figures and Spanish municipality data published in 2009 by the Spanish National Institute of Statistics (Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE)).
6.
INE, Encuesta Nacional de Inmigrantes ( 2007).
7.
Ibid., p. 136.
8.
Jéssica Retis, ‘Tendencias en la representación de los inmigrantes latinoamericanos en la prensa nacional española. Colombianos, ecuatorianos y argentinos: ¿iguales o diferentes?’ (Instituto Ortega y Gasset, Forum de Barcelona, 2004 ), p. 1.
9.
INE, op. cit.
10.
Ibid.
11.
Lola Delgado and Daniel Lozano, Latinos en España: cómo son y cómo viven colombianos, argentinos, ecuatorianos, venezolanos (Latin peoples in Spain: what Colombians, Argentines, Ecuadorians, Venezuelans are like and how they live) ( Madrid, La esfera de los libros, 2006). This useful work is based on in-depth interviews and fieldwork.
12.
Ibid., p. 61.
13.
See, for example, Ricard Zapata-Barrero, Multiculturalidad e inmigración (Spain, Ed. Síntesis, 2004); and Zapata-Barrero, Inmigración, innovación política y cultura de acomodación en España (Spain, CIDOB, 2004); Jéssica Retis, op cit.; Miguel Rodrigo, ‘Identidad cultural y etnocentrismo: una mirada desde Cataluñya’ (2003), available at: http://www.interculturalcommunication.org/documents.htm; Javier de Lucas, ‘La inmigración como res política’, Universidad de Valencia, available at: www.uv.es/CEFD/10/delucas.pdf (2004); Teun van Dijk, Ideología y discurso (Barcelona, Ariel, 2003); Lorenzo Cachón, ‘En la "España inmigrante": entre la fragilidad de los inmigrantes y las políticas de integración’, in Papeles del CEIC(no. 45, 2009).
14.
Zapata-Barrero,Multiculturalidad, op. cit., p. 75.
15.
Zapata-Barrero, Inmigración, op. cit., p. 13.
16.
Examples include: the Red de Mediación Intercultural La Caixa (La Caixa Intercultural Mediation Network); CEPAIM - Acción Integral con Migrantes (Integral Action with Migrants); INPROIN - Asociación por la Integración de Profesionales Inmigrantes (Association for the Integration of Immigrant Professionals); and the secretary of state for immigration and emigration.
