Upon discovering the colloquial use of Paki in Spain (or in Barcelona at the very least), Andreea and and I decided to dig a little deeper.
First stop? Google. After watching a documentary called Pakcelona, we learned about Huma Jamshed, a businesswoman who owns a travel agency and started a Pakistani women's association in Barcelona - ACESOP. We tracked her down in Raval, one of the city's better known immigrant-populated neighbourhoods. Since it was siesta time, we headed from her office to the women's centre.
After moving to Spain to complete a PhD in Madrid, Huma started a business in Barcelona and established ACESOP. Huma has developed an interesting perspective on the subject of Pakis. Check out the video below for her thoughts.
From this conversation, it became clear that for Huma survival issues were the primary priority and identity issues would only become important after the community becomes more established in Spain.
It is impossible to undermine the importance of her point; economic and social security are not only vital to quality of life but survival itself. When helping someone escape an abusive home and trying to ensure their immigration status will be valid without their sponsor, it becomes obvious that identity politics will not be front of mind.
This, however, does not mean that survival and identity are mutually exclusive issues. In immigrationspeak, settlement and integration are processes vital to considering immigration successful for both the immigrant and host country. (Yes, people have all sorts of issues with these terms and their meanings, but bear with me for now.)
Settlement typically refers to the immediate issues - housing, employment, schooling and the like.
Integration is a longer-term process, the ultimate aim being for immigrants to feel they are able to participate in their adopted society socially, economically, culturally and politically. For me, this vision represents the opposite of ghetto-ization.
When people have a name for a group of "ethnic" people that the community itself does not use, when they are geographically clustered in particular neighbourhoods that are considered dangerous until the yuppies move in and gentrify it, when an employer cannot with "good conscience" hire an individual because of their ethnic background as it is perceived to be a huge risk, when girls are being asked by their parents to not continue school after high school so as not to be corrupted by the "adopted" country's culture - this vision of integration is a distant reverie.
The way an identity is constructed by both the adopted society and the ethnic community will forever shape the relationship between the two.
When a Paki means a corner store to locals, it corners Pakis into a particular socio-economic box. Identity shapes how one will survive - barely living is barely survival.
First stop? Google. After watching a documentary called Pakcelona, we learned about Huma Jamshed, a businesswoman who owns a travel agency and started a Pakistani women's association in Barcelona - ACESOP. We tracked her down in Raval, one of the city's better known immigrant-populated neighbourhoods. Since it was siesta time, we headed from her office to the women's centre.
After moving to Spain to complete a PhD in Madrid, Huma started a business in Barcelona and established ACESOP. Huma has developed an interesting perspective on the subject of Pakis. Check out the video below for her thoughts.
From this conversation, it became clear that for Huma survival issues were the primary priority and identity issues would only become important after the community becomes more established in Spain.
It is impossible to undermine the importance of her point; economic and social security are not only vital to quality of life but survival itself. When helping someone escape an abusive home and trying to ensure their immigration status will be valid without their sponsor, it becomes obvious that identity politics will not be front of mind.
This, however, does not mean that survival and identity are mutually exclusive issues. In immigrationspeak, settlement and integration are processes vital to considering immigration successful for both the immigrant and host country. (Yes, people have all sorts of issues with these terms and their meanings, but bear with me for now.)
Settlement typically refers to the immediate issues - housing, employment, schooling and the like.
Integration is a longer-term process, the ultimate aim being for immigrants to feel they are able to participate in their adopted society socially, economically, culturally and politically. For me, this vision represents the opposite of ghetto-ization.
When people have a name for a group of "ethnic" people that the community itself does not use, when they are geographically clustered in particular neighbourhoods that are considered dangerous until the yuppies move in and gentrify it, when an employer cannot with "good conscience" hire an individual because of their ethnic background as it is perceived to be a huge risk, when girls are being asked by their parents to not continue school after high school so as not to be corrupted by the "adopted" country's culture - this vision of integration is a distant reverie.
The way an identity is constructed by both the adopted society and the ethnic community will forever shape the relationship between the two.
When a Paki means a corner store to locals, it corners Pakis into a particular socio-economic box. Identity shapes how one will survive - barely living is barely survival.
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