Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [130]
SPACE AND CITIZENSHIP
Parla, Spain
Even compared to the difficult experiences of the Malians of Paris and the Turks of Berlin, Lisaneddin Assa’s journey to Europe was a truly tough ordeal, an arrival that should not have worked.
When he left his tiny mountain village in the Rif region of northern Morocco, in 1999, there were only the vaguest rumours of an employment boom across the Strait of Gibraltar in Spain and of men who were willing, for a fee equivalent to almost a year’s earnings for a villager, to help Moroccans make the perilous 13-kilometer trip between the beaches of Tangier and the Andalusian coast.
Lisaneddin was the first member of his extended family to make that crossing, and the whole village was counting on him. At that time, despite more than a dozen centuries of interchanges between Morocco and Spain, the crossing was a novelty—Spain had been a closed society, a net exporter of emigrants, until the very last years of the twentieth century. The men on the beach who loaded each of the ill-constructed wooden rafts with several dozen migrants knew nothing of navigation, seamanship, currents, weather, or immigration. They took the money and, if the men were lucky, sent them off with an unreliable outboard motor and little else. Hundreds drowned every year, more starved or baked to death at sea or drifted until they landed, ruined, somewhere farther along the northern coast of Africa. Corpses washed ashore with alarming regularity.
Lisaneddin was lucky. But after he pulled himself off the beach and begged a ride northward to Spain’s central plain, things would get tougher. In a country whose language he did not speak, he found himself not just a minority but a real rarity: In the 1990s, the number of Moroccan citizens numbered in the tens of thousands in a country of 45 million.
For Lisaneddin and many other new arrivals, the only work available was picking strawberries. He slept outdoors, in alleyways and ravines, during the months when work was thin, and his Berber roots offered little help in sheltering him from the weather. “It was like being an animal,” he remembers. “In those years, we were the first wave to come, and we knew nothing. There weren’t even slums for us, nothing. We had to survive by our wits and eat what we could find and send everything back to the village.”
The arrival city would change his fortunes. When this soft-spoken, cheery man first recounted his story, we talked in his large butcher shop and supermarket at the foot of a small apartment building in the city of Parla, on the far southern outskirts of Madrid. He and several of his fellow villagers and family members live around here, where they have become homeowners, active citizens fluent in Spain’s language and culture, and poor but thriving participants in the European economy, as entrepreneurs, employees, or students.
In its physical appearance and original design, Parla seems a southern twin of Les Pyramides: a sprawling island of low-rise apartments that loom like a mirage above the dusty plain, linked by commuter train lines to the larger city. It is a postwar bedroom suburb that was soon overwhelmed by villagers moving inward. In 1960, it was a dusty agricultural village of 1,800; by 1978, it contained 31,000 Spanish factory workers; today it has almost 130,000 people, a large proportion of them South American or Moroccan immigrants and their children. As in Les Pyramides, over 80 percent of Parla