Inhospitable Hospitalities: Bad Tourists/Bad Subjects

A reflection on Marxist accompaniment and conviviality 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.

    Peripheral to the peninsular imagination, the Canary Islands are one of Spain’s main tourist hubs, an archipelago that defies imaginaries of insular remoteness through its immersion in the global. Each year, three million European tourists visit the islands, making seasonal tourism, service, and hospitality one of the few –precarious– options for Canarian livelihood. This particular monoculture intesects with all kinds of North/South contact zones. They are the site of arrival of Mediterranean perilous migrations and a mid-point between Europe and the Americas, making them one of the most explicit sites of global Spains. In the summer of 2023, increased heat and draught exacerbated by the massive use of hydric resources for tourism in the region set the island of Tenerife on fire, burning more than 15,000 hectares and displacing the inhabitants of more than thirty municipalities, echoing the ongoing deadly conjunction of mass tourism and climate change that became evident just a week earlier in Maui, Hawai’i.

    While “paradise islands” bear the brunt of mass tourism, they are not an exception but emplacements where these conditions become more visible. As I have learned from Caribbean theorists such as Antonio Benítez Rojo, islands repeat themselves and ripple through. At the Kingdom’s heart, the conditions of displacement for which peripheral spaces have functioned as laboratories can now be felt at the core in the form of unaffordable housing, touristification, and heat. In Madrid’s post-pandemic neoliberal landscape, the capital city’s traditionally migrant and working-class neighborhoods are being reorganized into Airbnb havens, luggage storage facilities replace local commerce, urban “heat islands” are becoming the norm as city planning privileges wealthy air-conditioned tourism –a luxury in a place where electricity is costly. Listening to the leftist, anti-racist, feminist, and queer organizers and fellows that we gathered for our Global Spains workshops, I wondered about the conditions of in/hospitality. Who feels welcome and who is received with hostility? Whose space is hospitable and whose is rendered inhospitable?

     Although I grew up in Spain, I have been living in Santa Barbara for the last six years where I am completing my doctoral studies in Comparative Literature, Caribbean Studies, and the Environment. Whenever I go back to Spain to visit family and friends, I return from this open-air resort of a city with a series of reasonable complaints: rent is impossible, third spaces are hard to come by, it is pretty but houses on the hills look like funeral homes: a rip off of Baudrillard’s characterization of Santa Barbara to show that at least I am doing my reading while also betraying my European gaze. The response I almost invariably get includes a rote saying: “es que como en España en ningún sitio,” “well, there’s nowhere like Spain.” The irritation I feel when I hear this phrase is not only due to its naive chauvinism, and neither is it entirely due to the casual repetitiveness of a sentence that shares historical kinship with the well-known “Spain is different,” that worn-out slogan of Franco’s aperturist moment that set the template for Spain’s perennial bet for mass tourism today. As a person who migrated from Venezuela to Spain at a young age and who is always ambiguously but almost undoubtedly from Spain, what bothers me about the phrase is a presumption of an unconditional and universal leisurely hospitality best encapsulated by Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s winning political campaign for neoliberal freedom during a post-pandemic lockdown: “nos podemos ir a una terraza a tomarnos una cerveza y vernos con los nuestros… a la madrileña”/“we can go to a terrace, drink beer, and meet up with our people… the Madrid way.” As I listened to the experiences of our mostly migrant Madrid-based fellows, I thought: where is this Spanish hospitality that seems to be the consensus, left and right, and that I myself romanticize when in the United States?

    Overstating hospitality is part of the structure of feeling of Spanishness, yet in its Francoist roots and its contemporary iterations, its hypervisibility breeds erasure. This erasure is perhaps more banal than those we learned about in Emilio Silva’s presentation on the community labor of finding and excavating Francoist mass graves. Still, it is an erasure that nevertheless allows for Spanish self-perception as an intrinsically hospitable space. My point is that the production of “hospitable Spain” has as its flip side the production of other inhospitable and outwardly hostile Spains (Spain should be spelled S-pain, as presenter Francisco Godoy Vega reminded us). In addition to its continued reconfiguration and dismantlement of lived space, the production of hospitable Spain is contingent upon the predominantly migrant labor that populates kitchens, hotels, and “service rooms”. During our visit to Servicio Doméstico Activo (Active Domestic Service), a grassroots organization of migrant domestic and care work in Spain, I not only thought about how precarious the roots of making a hospitable space can be, but that hospitality is built upon a structure of inhospitality. As one of the organizers explained, most “internal” domestic workers –those who live in the households they make homely and tend to– are, in reality, deeply unwelcome by their employers. Part of the organization’s mission is precisely to provide a space for domestic workers to leave inhospitable living conditions during off-days, facilitating professional training, legal counsel or simply providing room for leisure and rest. While the restaurants, bars, and hotels that constitute the network upon which hospitality is built are not under an internal domestic work regime (the organization’s focus), inhospitality is still the norm in living and working conditions in the predominantly Latinx service sector.

Institutionalized inhospitality is also linked to carcereal logics. During our tour of the remains of the old Francoist prison in Carabanchel, we learned about the history of the political prison and its demolition, a landscape of erasure where it is absence that speaks. Just across the memorial that former prisoners and community members have built, we could see another –this time still standing and very much active– building of ultimate institutionalized inhospitality and indignity: a CIE (Centro de Internamiento de Extranjeros) or a migrant detention center banally decorated with what makes it look like a circus tent. At the end of our tour, we tried to walk around it from a public road. A disembodied voice from a speaker told us to leave the road immediately, making it very clear that we were not welcome in those premises. The minute it took us to be kicked out of that road –and our freedom to easily leave it– brings me to a last question: what do we make of our position as, in some ways, intellectual tourists coming from a US institution to Madrid or simply visiting sites of struggle that we might or might not belong to but that we might share a kinship with? Is a tourist always an “ugly thing” who only finds what they already planned to find, as Antiguan writer Jaimaca Kincaid puts it in her classic A Small Place?

   As I write this piece, I try to tell myself not to write from my own resentments only and to honor the patches of convergence and community re-generation that have had sometimes long and sometimes emerging trajectories in Madrid. These “patches” –as Anna Tsing calls nodes of global interconnection and friction– are not only the labor of the traditional and institutionalized left, but also the labor of community in spaces of anti-fascist, feminist, and anti-racist mutual aid: organizers who are carving out livable spaces from within hostile landscapes. Listening and sharing a space with multiple thinker-activists from my own position full of contradictions and ambivalences towards a place that also ambivalently welcomes us, I think about what can be gained from the position of the unwelcome in its multiple forms. For me, the unwelcome shares kinship with Sara Ahmed’s “feminist killjoy,” being the bad guest at that dinner party where you are not supposed to talk politics. If conviviality is about the generation of “collective subjects,” can unwelcomeness –in all its variegated forms– serve as a node of articulation of a subjectivity-in-common? Can Global Spains, as a collective transnational training in praxis, function as a form of “unwelcome” travel? In some ways, we –as a collective subject– were antithetical to the ideal subjects of tourism. We were bad tourists in a good sense. Our walking practice through sites of concerted forgetfulness, our talks with undocumented migrant organizations, our interactions with feminist and anarchist interlocutors, and our participation during Orgullo Crítico (Critical Pride) were very distant from the beautified and monumental itineraries that subtend the Spanish hospitality script. Yet, I still wonder if this is enough. I wonder how not to be a touch-and-go bad tourist towards those I might ally with.

    This brings me to accompaniment, another important conceptual node in the workshop. Accompaniment is a practice that ensures the continuity of one’s involvement in the communities we work with. As a methodological principle or disposition, one of its ethical openings is to allow for collective and non-extractive knowledge production. It is a sustained commitment to a particular community. Accompaniment requires time and more than a two-week visit, so in that sense –and I speak for myself– I have yet to think of ways of being more thant a complacent good listener toward communities with whom I stand in solidarity in Spain. I keep wondering how, as someone still in-between places and by now difficultly un/rooted, I can offer something from this transnational positionality where accompaniment might be carried out sometimes from a distance. Maybe it involves a labor of cultural and linguistic translation or creating a common language for those who might feel interpolated by “the unwelcome.” Until I figure out how to bring this to practice through my own initiatives, I cannot consider myself exempt from being that very terrible thing: a bad tourist of the very ugly kind.