Inhospitable Hospitalities: Bad Tourists/Bad Subjects
A reflection on Marxist accompaniment and convilality praxis by co-organizer Maria Zazzarino
“Everybody hates a tourist.”
from Pulp’s song “Common People”(1995)
“An ugly thing; that is what you are when you become a tourist.”
from Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place (1988)
The night before the Global Spains roundtable with Sindicato de Inquilinos de Madrid at Ateneo La Maliciosa, I was scrolling through Instagram and learned that the tenant’s union chapter in the Canary Islands had been set on fire. According to the union’s Twitter, everything burned down –books, clothes, toys, all material donations, and the union’s meeting place were now ashes. While the police did not confirm the cause of the fire, Sindicato de Inquilinos reported several previous threats to their building. The fire, they say, was intentional, a raging illustration of the rising tensions around housing and tourism in Spain.
Reflections of an Andean Woman on the Potentials and Limits of Conviviality and Accompaniment Solidarity Paradigms
Global Spains Fellow ICHMAWARMI - Migrant and brown woman, antiracist decolonial artivist
I write this a Brown woman whose grandmothers were Quechua-speakers of the Andes and who migrated from the mountains to the capital city Lima, Perú. This is the reason why I grew up speaking Spanish and not Quechua. Later, different circumstances and travels lead me to migrate to Madrid, Spain, where I have been living for seven years, of which three I have been with a residence permit. Previously, I was undocumented, “sin papeles,” and it is under these conditions that I experience the embodied pain of being “the other,” “the non-human,” “the panchita,” the “sudaca,” ––Spanish slurs for Andean and South American migrants.