Este artículo que me he encontrado casualmente en Facebook es de hace más de un año, pero resulta ahora más vigente que nunca, y también mucho más doloroso. Leyendo esto se me hace un nudo en la garganta, porque sé que como la fuga no cese España se va a la mierda. Y no nos engañeamos, ¿qué razones les quedan a los jóvenes más listos y preparados para no marcharse? Bien pocas…

No llevan maletas de cartón, pero componen un nuevo éxodo [...] que dispersa a nuestros jóvenes por toda Europa y gran parte del mundo, que nos priva de su saber, de su aportación y de su compañía. Pero, aparentemente nadie se escandaliza por esta fuga de cerebros, lenta pero inexorable, que nos privará de muchos de nuestros mejores talentos. Nadie protesta por esta nueva oleada de exiliados que son una acusación silenciosa del fracaso y de engaño. Se van en silencio por el túnel de embarque en el que les alcanzará la melancolía por la pérdida temprana de su tierra.

No son, como dicen, una generación perdida para ellos mismos. No son los socorridos ni-nis que sirven para culpar a la juventud de su falta de empleo. Son una generación perdida para nuestro país y para nuestro futuro. Un tremendo error que pagaremos muy caro en forma de atraso, de empobrecimiento intelectual y técnico. Aunque todavía no lo sepamos.

This week The Economist has an article about what they call “one of the world’s biggest social trends”: the rise of international marriages — that is, involving couples of different nationalities.

A hundred years ago, such alliances were confined to the elite of the elite. [...]

International marriages matter partly because they reflect—and result from—globalisation. As people holiday or study abroad, or migrate to live and work, the visitors meet and marry locals. Their unions are symbols of cultural integration, and battlefields for conflicts over integration. Few things help immigrants come to terms with their new country more than becoming part of a local family. Though the offspring of such unions may struggle with the barriers of prejudice, at their best international marriages reduce intolerance directly themselves, and indirectly through their progeny.

And apparently, in many parts of the world, cross-border nuptials are on the rise. Also amongst my friends.

[via While you were sleeping]

I first heard about Juneteenth only two years ago, when I came across a concert and festival at the Civic Center Plaza while shopping for groceries at the farmers’ market that happens there twice a week. Also known as Freedom Day or Emancipation Day, it is is recognized as a state holiday in 39 of the United States, and it commemorates the announcement of the abolition of slavery in the state of Texas in June 18 and 19, 1865 (although the Emancipation Proclamation had been effective since January 1, 1863). As Fitz at the St Anthony Foundation blog aptly puts it:

For two whole years all those enslaved people in Texas were legally freed, but went on living and laboring in their dehumanized condition because no one had managed to get the good news of their liberation to them.

And on the broader significance of a holiday like Juneteenth today, he offered quite a deep thought:

Haven’t you had some Juneteenth moments in your own life? For many of us in recovery it’s been a clarifying moment (or season) when we realized that we actually COULD live free from the slavery of addiction. For others it may have been the liberating experience of crossing over some previously forbidding barrier, getting past fear and apprehension, (perhaps by volunteering at a place like St. Anthony’s Dining Room) and discovering that the world isn’t as scary a place as it once seemed to be. And for some of us it may have been one of those light-bulb-going-on-in-our-head moments when, thanks to the revealing insights of a teacher or mentor, or even to the stubborn position of an opponent in a debate, some previously hidden truth suddenly, finally, opens up to us.

It appears that the San Francisco Juneteenth Festival is the oldest and largest Juneteenth Celebration outside of Texas where Juneteenth originated, and this year marked the 61th edition. According to the SF Juneteenth website, it is the largest gathering of African-Americans in northern California and it originated when, in the early 1950s, Dr. Wesley Johnson Sr. (then owner of The Texas Playhouse on Fillmore Street) invited all Bay Area Blacks to come join the “June 19th” celebration at his famous Fillmore street cocktail lounge. The celebration expanded outside his doors to the point that Johnson along with local community and business leaders, led a parade down Fillmore street.

To celebrate, this year I didn’t go to the festival at the Civic Center, but instead I visited the Museum of the African Diaspora for a special program of live jazz music, a traditional storytelling session (accompanied by a banjo) and to check out the temporary exhibit of prints by Romare Bearden. I didn’t know this artist, who is famous mainly for his collage works often depicting African American themes. I really enjoyed the prints I saw and checked out the website of the Romare Bearden foundation in NYC, and you should too. Highly recommended.

Se cumple una década de los disturbios racistas de El Ejido, los más graves ocurridos en el Estado español, y Canal Solidario se pregunta “¿hemos aprendido algo?”. Viendo que durante esta década se han ido sucediendo otros episodios de altercados y violencia colectiva contra la población inmigrante (véase Terrassa, Elche y Roquetas de Mar), me inclino hacia el no. Por si alguien necesita que le refresquen la memoria, Canal Solidario hace un repaso a estos cuatro casos famosos.

Recordemos también el follón que causó recientemente el Ayuntamiento de Vic al anunciar que no dejaría empadronar a los inmigrantes sin visado o permiso de residencia (aunque luego se hicieron marcha atrás).

Todo esto me viene a la cabeza al leer la última entrada en el blog de Luna, titulada “Mujer afro, española y sobradamente preparada compara experiencias“. En ella cita a una mujer española anónima, deducimos que de origen africano y por lo tanto negra, comparando su experiencia en España y en Gran Bretaña, donde la gente está mucho más acostumbrada a ver a gente de todos los colores en todo tipo de trabajos y situaciones sociales. He aquí un extracto:

[...] era gracioso porque siempre la vacante estaba abierta: “sí, sí, pásate a tal hora en tal sitio.” Y yo iba tan contenta a mi entrevista, arreglada y todo, y llegabas ahí y no te creas que te iban a hacer la entrevista (…): entrabas por la puerta y ya les veías la cara de susto, “ay la chiquilla esta, la morenita ¿no?” [Yo les decía:] “Soy la chica que ha llamado para esto …” [Y contestaban:] “ah, no es que mira … ya … ya el puesto está cogido.” “Pero si he llamado esta mañana y me han dicho que …” “No, es que …” Eso si no te decían directamente que no te pasaras cuando les decías tu nombre por teléfono (…).
Me fui a Inglaterra de primeras (…) y vi que en los bancos hay negros, en los centros de empleo hay negros, en la política hay negros, o sea, que hay visibilización [de la población negra] y dije “yo quiero estar aquí”.

Leer la cita entera aquí, que no tiene desperdicio. Su comentario sobre cuando va en autobús y nadie quiere sentarse al lado de ella me ha recordado un cortometraje fantástico titulado Schwarzfahrer (juego de palabras entre la palabra para la gente que se cuela sin pagar y literalmente ‘pasajero negro’), que colgué por aquí hace algunos meses (es el segundo). Y también me ha recordado la anécdota que me contó un día a un amigo mío marfileño para ilustrar las dificultades de integración que está sufriendo su esposa en Suiza, donde se encuentra estudiando un doctorado en literatura francesa: nunca nadie se sienta a su lado en el tranvía. En todas partes cuecen habas, sí, pero España es una tierra de cruce de caminos y el único país de Europa que tiene fronteras con África, mientras que Suiza es una confederación de pueblos montañeses que vivieron la mayor parte de su historia aislados.

Y con todo esto en mente me pregunto, ¿hemos aprendido algo?

Y de propina, un fragmento del reportaje de Josep María Martín sobre un piso de 50 metros cuadrados en Lavapiés en el que viven 8 personas, la mayoría inmigrantes senegaleses. Para que veáis a lo que se dedican:

Today is International Migrant’s Day, and although one way or another we are all migrants, some people have a harder time than others migrating. Such as children. Or people forced to migrate because of the less than ideal conditions back home. This film is a reminder of how hard it is.

[H/T Oso]

It’s Friday Evening, so it’s time for some music. And what better than a video from K’naan, one of my favourite African musicians? It’s from 2005, from his first album The Dusty Foot Philosopher and it’s titled “Soo Bax”, which is Somali for “Get Out”. In it he criticizes politicians and warlords that perpetuate the conflicts in his home country of Somalia. At one point he says:

Mogadishu used to be a place the world came to see

And if, like me, you can’t get enough of K’naan I recommend this interview on Democracy Now! where he talks about the Somalia of his childhood (“my environment was incredibly beautiful and poetic”), about the breakout of war when he was 9, migrating to the US, PSD & music as his therapy (“I hoped to survive through songs”), and US policy in Somalia.

[Hat tip @jranck]

Via the blog A Bombastic Element (which I’ve been really enjoying lately), I found this wonderful story about Liberian cooking. It’s an audio slideshows from the NYT’s “One in 8 Million” series, chronicling the heroic and quirky in the lives of everyday New Yorkers.

It features Eliza Smith, 62, a Liberian who immigrated to the US in 1969 who cooks traditional food from her country in her Queens apartment. According to the story intro, her husband, who was from South Carolina and died in 1986, loved her traditional Liberian recipes. So did their friends, and in the mid-1990′s, one asked if he could pay her to cook for him weekly. Soon, neighbors and friends of friends were calling, asking if they could come by and eat in her kitchen or take meals home. She also catered weddings, graduations and other parties. She charges $15 to $20 a meal, and sends most of her profits to a Liberian elementary school.

Although the photos by Todd Heisler are in black and white and I would have liked to see the colours of Ms Smith’s food – especially the combination of meat and the fish that she says makes Liberian food different and “funky”, the story is lovely and well worth checking out. And I loved this quote by Ms Smith which I think can be applied to African cooking in general:

I just can’t cook enough for me, I don’t know how to do that. I come from a large family, we were 12 kids and when we cook, we cook a lot of food for everyone to have.

Stumbling upon some blogs, I found a very interesting excerpt from Barack Obama’s memoir Dreams of my father which I think is worth sharing. I haven’t read the book, which was written almost 15 years ago, but according to the back cover description it’s about Obama’s emotional journey after his father dies in a car accident. That takes him from Kansas and Hawaii to Kenya trying to retrace his African side by finding out more about his father, and his life away from him that he never knew.

This excerpt is a reflection about his passage through Europe on his way to Kenya, during which he remembers a Senegalese man he crossed paths with in Spain:

By the end of the first week or so, I realized that I’d made a mistake. It wasn’t that Europe wasn’t beautiful; everything was just as I’d imagined it. It just wan’t mine. I felt as if I were living out someone else’s romance; the incompleteness of my own history stood between me and the sites I saw like a hard pane of glass. I began to suspect that my European stop was just one more means of delay, one more attempt to coming to terms with the Old Man. Stripped of language, stripped of work and routine – stripped even of the racial obsessions to which I’d become so accustomed and which I had taken (perversely) as a sign of my own maturation -I had been forced to look inside myself and had found only great emptiness there.

Would this trip to Kenya finally fill that emptiness? The folks back in Chicago thought so. It’ll be just like Roots, Will said at my going-away party. A pilgrimage, Asante had called it. For them, as for me, Africa had become an idea more than an actual place, a new promised land full of ancient traditions and sweeping vistas, noble struggles and talking drums. With the benefit of distance, we engaged Africa in a selective embrace – the same sort of embrace I’d once offered the Old Man. What would happen once I relinquished that distance? It was nice to believe that the truth would somehow set me free. But what if that was wrong? What if the truth only disappointed, and my father’s death meant nothing, and his leaving me behind meant nothing, and the only tie that bound me to him, or to Africa, was a name, a blood type, or white people’s scorn?

I switched off the overhead light and closed my eyes, letting my man drift back to an Afrian I’d met while traveling through Spain, another man no the run. I had been waiting for a night bus in a roadside tavern about halfway between Madrid and Barcelona. A few old men sat at tables and drank wine from short, cloudy glasses. There was a pool table off to one side, and for some reason I had racked up the balls and started to play [...]

As I was finishing up the table, a man in a thin wool sweater had appeared out of nowhere and asked if he could buy me some coffee. He spoke no English, and his Spanish wasn’t much bettr than mine, but he had the winning smile and the urgency of someone in need of company. Standing at the bar, he told me he was from Senegal, and was crisscrossing Spain for seasonal work. He showed me a battered photograph he kep in his wallet of a young girl with round, smooth cheeks. His wife, he said; he had to leave her behind. They would be reunited as soon as he saved the money. He would write and send for her.

We ended up riding to Barcelona together, neither of us talking much, him turning to me every so often to try to explain the jokes on the Spanish program being shown on a TV-video contraption hooked up above the driver’s seat. Shortly before dawn, we were deposited in front of an old bus depont, and my friend gestured me over to a short, thick palm that grew beside the road. From his knap-sack he pulled out a toothbrush, a comb, and a bottle of water that he handed to me with great ceremony. And together we washed ourselves under the morning mist, before hoisting our bags over our shoulders and heading toward town.

What was his name? I couldn’t remember now; just another hungry man far away from home, one of the many children of former colonies – Algerians, West Indians, Pakistanis – now breaching the barricades of their former masters, mounting their own ragged, haphazard invasion. And yet, as we walked toward the Ramblas, I had felt as if I knew him as well as any man; that, coming from opposite ends of the earth, we were somehow making the same journey. When we finally parted company, I had remained in the street for a long, long time, watching his slender, bandy-legged image shrink into the distance, one part of me wishing then that I could go with him into a life of open roads and blue mornings; another part realizing that such a wish was also a romance, an idea, as partial as my image of the Old Man or my image of Africa.

Yesterday I wrote about the photography exhibit Still here, still human by Abbie Trayler-Smith on UK asylum-seekers. This reminded me of a recently released documentary that tells the story of a Malian woman and her daughter who are facing deportation in the US. The title is Mrs. Goundo’s Daughter, referring to the two-year-old girl who could be forced to undergo female genital mutilation (FGM) if she’s not granted asylum with her mother and is repatriated to Mali. Using rarely cited grounds for political asylum, Goundo must convince an immigration judge that her daughter is in danger.

[Photo by Barbara Attie, co-director of the film]

Mrs. Goundo’s husband fled drought and ethnic conflict in his native Mali. Mrs. Goundo came to the United States in 1999. Together, they are raising three young children in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. To stay in the U.S., Mrs. Goundo must persuade an immigration judge that her two-year old daughter Djenebou, born in the US, will almost certainly suffer clitoral excision if Goundo is deported. In Mali, where up to 85% of women and girls are excised, Mrs. Goundo and her husband are convinced they would be powerless to protect their daughter from her well-intentioned grandparents, who believe all girls should be excised.
From the production company’s website:

Mrs Goundo’s daugher bridges Mrs. Goundo’s two worlds. In a Malian village, we see 62 girls, six months to ten years old, preparing to be excised just as their mothers, sisters, aunts and grandmothers were before them. The girls are warned they must be brave and not cry, although, as one mother tells us: “The pain is very deep. There is nothing we can do to lessen it.” We hear Malian activists fighting to end the practice, and traditionalists who defend it. We see its deep roots in the largely Islamic culture.

4,500 miles away in Philadelphia, we hear Mrs. Goundo’s friends from West Africa tell how, even though they themselves were excised, they are determined to save their daughters from the pain and the sometimes horrific health consequences of ritual cutting. Mrs. Goundo is the first of her community to seek asylum on these grounds, and in Mrs Goundo’s daughter we join her friends’ anxious vigil as they await the outcome of her asylum hearing.

You can watch the trailer of the film below, and a 6min segment here.

The film was screened at the recent Human Rights Film Festival, but I still haven’t had the chance to see it (hopefully it will come to San Francisco soon). But Dave Bennion of the Immigrant Rights blog at Change.org saw it and here’s what he had to say about it:

This is a film I recommend to anyone interested in learning about asylum law or the practice of FGM (or female genital cutting). At the end of the film, the filmmakers were asked what the audience could do to get involved with this issue, and they recommended supporting the work of Tostan, an NGO based in Senegal that works with local organizations throughout Africa to halt the practice of FGM. I would also say you could support local or national immigrant rights organizations who represent asylum-seekers on a daily basis (ACLU, NILC, AILF, and any number of local organizations).

Read his full review here.

Browsing the BBC Africa website, I found an interesting In Pictures series by Abbie Trayler-Smith of asylum seekers in the UK whose claims have been refused by the government and so they now live without support. The pictures belong to an exhibit in a London gallery titled Still here, still human documenting the underground world of destitute asylum seekers.

Below is a picture of Monique, 32, originally from the DR Congo. Apparently she came from a comfortable family, and was detained and tortured after taking part in an anti-government demonstration in which some of her friends were killed.

You can check the rest of the Still here, still human series at Abbie Trayler-Smith’s website (part 1 here and part 2 here).