Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

THE DISPOSABLE IMMIGRANT: THE AESTHETICS OF WASTE IN LAS CARTAS DE ALOU

2010; Routledge; Volume: 11; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14636204.2010.512754

1469-9818

Diana Q. Burkhart,

Hispanic-African Historical Relations

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Although there are distinctions between the concepts of race and immigration, they have become conflated in the popular Spanish imagination. Many native Spaniards consider themselves ethnically, religiously, and culturally homogeneous, despite the important presence of Muslims in Spain throughout much of its history, as well as other culturally diverse groups. Due in part to the wave of immigration from Africa and Latin America in the 1980s and 90s, most people of different racial backgrounds are presumed to be immigrants, regardless of how long they have been in the country. As I am dealing with Spanish perceptions of these issues, and it is difficult to separate concerns about immigration and race in the context of contemporary Spanish society, I will employ the concepts of the racial “Other” and the immigrant “Other” interchangeably. 2. Helen Graham and Antonio Sánchez speculate that in an effort to conform to the standards of the European Union, Spaniards adopted not only regulations, but also some of the attitudes that they thought would make them appear more European. Graham and Sánchez suggest: “It is almost as if constructing and adopting the same ‘others’ or outgroups as the rest were considered the hallmark of Spain's membership of the ‘club’” (415). In other words, by asserting their power (in terms of legislation and social class) over immigrants, they stepped away from their image as a backward nation and took a step closer to resembling their European counterparts. 3. According to a recent article published in 2008 in El País.com, the congress approved “El programa de retorno voluntario de inmigrantes”, which offers unemployed immigrants the possibility of receiving 40% of their unemployment benefits in Spain and 60% of the remaining benefits in their native country, provided that they promise that they will not return to Spain in the next three years. (“El congreso”). In part, this legislation reflects the belief that unemployed immigrants are a significant burden on Spain and that disposing of them will help to improve the state of the economy. Few have recognized just how much Spain has exploited cheap, immigrant labor to benefit the Spanish economy and how it will rely on immigrants to take care of the enormous aging population in the future. 4. Spearheaded by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, Third Cinema is a “lucha antiimperialista de los pueblos del Tercer Mundo, y de sus equivalentes en el seno de las metrópolis” (60). This movement from the 1960s and 70s strove for the “descolonización de la cultura” (60). Film became a means by which individuals could unite politics and art, and combat the forces of neocolonialism (62). 5. It is important to recognize that social misery, and the degrading living conditions that often accompany it, may also be associated with other forms of marginalization, such as homelessness, mental illness, and prostitution. One could just as easily analyze the metaphorical value of waste in films about the homeless and other such individuals. What makes the situation of immigrants unique is that they are perpetually viewed as outsiders and that deportation is an option for getting rid of them. For other marginalized people, places like prisons and mental institutions come close to serving as the equivalent of deportation. 6. Robert Stam employs the term cloaca maxima to refer to waste produced by the body and garbage produced by society, both of which reveal what an individual has consumed and how one has lived his/her life. He states: “As the lower stratum of the socius, the symbolic ‘bottom’ or cloaca maxima of the body politic, garbage signals the return of the repressed” (41). Like bodily waste, garbage functions as a “truth teller” and a great “social leveler” because everyone produces it and one can deduce a lot of information about a society by inspecting it (41). 7. In other movies such as Ignacio Vilar's Ilegal (2003), waste imagery serves a different purpose. Whereas in Las cartas de Alou the Muslim immigrants reclaim the marginalized space of the sewage tunnel as a home and a place of worship, in Ilegal it provides an escape route for illegal immigrants who are running away from their enemies. It is ironic that in order to avoid being eliminated or deported as if they were the waste of Spanish society, the immigrants must learn how to navigate tunnels of waste. Even though the sewage tunnels in the two films serve different purposes, they share their contradictory nature as places that are both safe and dangerous at the same time. They are safe in the sense that they provide a secure place that is separated from mainstream society where immigrants can do as they please with little risk of harassment, deportation, imprisonment or other such repercussions. However, the tunnels pose a threat because of the likelihood that toxins, bacteria and other such harmful substances fester there. 8. In other films about immigration, the rhetoric that racists use to talk about immigrants frequently calls to mind garbage imagery. The film Taxi (1996 Taxi . Dir. Carlos Saura. Perf. Ingrid Rubio, Carlos Fuentes, and Eusebio Lázaro . Columbia Tristar , 1996 . DVD . [Google Scholar]) by Carlos Saura portrays a group of taxi drivers who kill people whom they deem undesirable, primarily immigrants, prostitutes, homosexuals, vagabonds and drug addicts. Calero, the most racist character in the film, says that immigrants are “basura de importación”, and employs words like “estercolero” to describe Spain. By using the word “importación”, he evokes its polar opposite, “deportación”, thus establishing a connection between the concepts of deportation and waste removal. In the same way that people illegally dump garbage and burn it in incinerators, the taxi drivers toss the bodies of their victims over bridges at night and burn down their shantytowns. Albeit not a film primarily about immigration, a similar phenomenon occurs in Alex de la Iglesia's El día de la bestia (1995). Motivated by the motto that they spray-paint on the walls of the city, “Limpia Madrid”, a gang of extremists decides to clean up the streets, killing homeless people, immigrants and other people whom they consider a burden on Spanish society by burning them alive.