Home Away from Home

Immigrant Narratives, Domesticity, and Coloniality in Contemporary Spanish Culture

N. Michelle Murray

• Publisher: UNC Department of Romance Studies
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781469647463
• eBook ISBN: 9781469647470
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria europea

Home Away from Home: Immigrant Narratives, Domesticity, and Coloniality in Contemporary Spanish Culture examines ideological, emotional, economic, and cultural phenomena brought about by migration through readings of works of literature and film featuring domestic workers. In the past thirty years, Spain has experienced a massive increase in immigration. Since the 1990s, immigrants have been increasingly female, as bilateral trade agreements, migration quotas, and immigration policies between Spain and its former colonies (including the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Equatorial Guinea, and the Philippines) have created jobs for foreign women in the domestic service sector. These migrations reveal that colonial histories continue to be structuring elements of Spanish national culture, even in a democratic era in which its former colonies are now independent. Migration has also transformed the demographic composition of Spain and has created complex new social relations around the axes of gender, race, and nationality. Representations of migrant domestic workers provide critical responses to immigration and its feminization, alongside profound engagements with how the Spanish nation has changed since the end of the Franco era in 1975. Throughout Home Away from Home, readings of works of literature and film show that texts concerning the transnational nature of domestic work uniquely provide a nuanced account of the cultural shifts occurring in late twentieth- through twenty-first-century Spain.

CHAPTER ONE

CLOSE TO HOME: FILIPINA DOMESTIC WORKERS IN DEMOCRATIC SPAIN

FILIPINA immigrant domestic workers appear in many texts published during the key years of the 1980s and 1990s, the historical period of democratic Spain’s entry into modernity.³⁴ Filipinos emigrate massively to nations around the world, and in 2016, 10% of all Filipinos, the majority of whom were women, resided outside of the Phillippines. Spain is a key destination as it provides residence after only two years because of its colonial history with the Phillippines. The presence of Filipina women in Spain attests to the demographic and social shifts occurring in the democratic period.³⁵ Filipina domestic workers form part of Juan Madrid’s short story “Metro Tirso de Molina” (1987), and José Ángel Mañas’s novel Historias del Kronen [Stories of the Kronen] (1992). The late 1980s and early 1990s is a vital element of the texts as the period marks Spain’s Europeanization and modernization after decades of insularity. While the two works’ primary themes initially seem unrelated to gender and migration, my readings will show that through their portrayal of migration and domestic work, both works articulate sharp critiques of the Spanish state. The Filipina characters gesture toward the wealth of the new democracy and its obverse: the latent precariousness immigrants face in democratic, “post-national” Spain.³⁶ Specifically, the domestic workers’ relationships with Spanish protagonists–and the broader society they tend to symbolize–illuminate Spain’s negation of its violent colonial past, which nevertheless begins to perturb its heretofore uncritically cosmopolitan present. These patterns illuminate the force of coloniality from the perspective of the former colony as migrants in precarious economic and political contexts come to symbolize the imperial designs that fuel globalization.

The short story “Metro Tirso de Molina” forms part of Juan Madrid’s collection of short stories Cuentos del asfalto [Asphalt Stories]. Like much of Madrid’s work, this collection features criminal characters and police-style fiction set in the Spanish capital. Immigrants appear in short stories in the collection Cuentos del asfalto, signifying their incorporation into the expanding Spanish economy, specifically in the informal sectors, which are often tethered to a dangerous criminal underworld. In addition to the Filipina domestic worker, other migrants include heroin dealers with names like “El Morito” [The Little Moor] and “El Negro” [The Black Man]. The migrant drugdealers appear in a short story “Nunca hables demasiado” [Don’t Ever Talk Too Much], which recounts a drug deal gone awry because of a police informant. The presumably immigrant traffickers engage in illegal activities and face incarceration and violence as a result. The representation of foreign immigrants in Cuentos del asfalto falls in line with early representational practices of Otherness. Tracing the presence of immigrants in contemporary Spanish literature, Daniel Gier notes “sus apariciones suelen ser fugaces y casi siempre conectadas al mundo de la droga, la prostitución, el crimen, o el fracaso humano” (in Rivera Hernández 38). [their appearances are brief and almost always connected to the world of drugs, prostitution, crime, or human failure]. I explore “Metro Tirso de Molina” to show the ways that, despite her positioning in the private sphere and ostensible distance from the criminal world, the domestic worker character also endures brutality. For its part, the important novel Historias del Kronen ushers in a new generation of writers in twentieth-century Spain. This neo-realist work captures the dynamic changes occurring in democratic Spain. In this prominent, critically-acclaimed novel, a Filipina character again signals both the demographic shifts taking place in the capital and the partial inclusion of migrants in the nation as domestic servants who confront inequalities.

Genre is critical to both narratives. Cuentos del asfalto is crime fiction, while Historias del Kronen is a neorealist novel. Both genres rely on violence as structuring elements of the plot; in these instances, violence is bound up in colonial ideologies and attendant conceptualizations of race and nation. I, therefore, assert this violence is strategic as it attempts to preserve racism and xenophobia, which can no longer be defended through official, legal channels. Or as Walter Benjamin has suggested, violence is wielded at critical points that expose the state’s impotence (287). While the central Spanish state’s power may not seem as evident during the late 1980s and early 1990s, I am arguing that for immigrants working in the domestic sphere, many of whom are unauthorized, the state’s potency is clear. In this way, as in all nation-states, the precarious situation of Spain’s most vulnerable residents and disadvantaged residents reveal the nation-state’s force. In processes that remind us of Freud’s essay on negation, the state disavows its impotence even as its nationalist violence stresses that state power no longer controls who traverses national boundaries and the positions that migrants assume upon accessing national space. The violence against Filipina women in the texts under study thus shows the ways that immigration can elicit nationalist reactions that refuse to concede to new millennium realities in which national borders are increasingly porous, technology facilitates global contact, and the state authorizes migrations that alter the cultural landscape. Even when the texts turn to a domestic sphere ostensibly devoted to comfort and acceptance, the narratives detail varying degrees of personal degradation pivotal to each genre. These works, therefore, allow for critical reflection upon the ways that immigrant women exist at the intersection of inside/outside as authorized guest workers in a nation that eschews difference and as domestic laborers whose work is indispensable yet denigrated due to their Otherness. They also convey the significance of the Spanish home as a symbol of the affective, economic, and psychological space in which we find these paradoxes.

In both “Metro Tirso de Molina” and Historias del Kronen, the domestic workers originate from the Philippines, a former Spanish colony. Examining the Phillippines is a critical operation of rethinking the way contemporary Spain is researched and conceptualized. As Adam Lifshey notes, “[The Philippines] remains virtually unacknowledged by Spanish departments despite over three centuries of Spanish colonialism” (17). Examining the complex relationship between Spain and the Philippines specifically through the Filipina women who live and work in Spain thus enables me to recontextualize Spain’s democratic era as one of disavowed coloniality. The Philippine origins of both women remind the reader of supposedly defunct colonial relations resurrected in bilateral trade agreements. As Spain consolidated its global economic and political position in the 1990s, shared language and culture rooted in colonial relations created new business arrangements that provided the young democracy with the markets its expanding economy required. Araceli Masterson points out, “During the 1990s, Spain clearly turned with renewed strength to its former colonies, and, by 1999, the country affirmed itself as Latin America’s main investor, something that had not occurred with such force since the colonial period” (22). As mentioned in the Introduction, the neoliberal foundation of the political economy is an important element in maintaining the status quo as Spain transitioned from a dictatorship to a representative democracy. The bilateral trade agreements give policy status to the important connections and contradictions intrinsic to transnational workforces in an era of globalization, a process that upholds historical global asymmetries even as it heralds a society marked by connectivity, diversity, proximity, and horizontalization. Gilbert G. González et. al. observe, “It is clear that touted globalization schemes actually promote increasing disparity within nations, between labor and capital, and between poor and rich nations. Such schemes represent little more than new manifestations of imperialism” (xii). Filipina migrants’ work scenarios in Spain exemplify the contradictions of globalized labor in postcolonial Europe. Rhacel Parreñas studies Filipina domestic workers throughout Europe to illustrate a compelling paradox of the denationalization of economies and concurrent renationalization of politics. These processes operate in tandem to permit foreigners to enter into national workforces even as receiving nations assert a distinctive identity against perceived “threats” of modernization and globalization (Parreñas 96).

Spain’s former relationship with the Philippines creates attractive immigration policies; additionally, the domestic service industry characterized by precariousness and invisibility confers upon these immigrants a “privileged” status that enables them to work and live in Spain. Labor agreements grant Filipino guest workers numerous benefits: they can earn Social Security while in Spain; they are only taxed once on their income rather than paying taxes in Spain and in the Philippines; and they are guaranteed their pensions, even if they leave Spain. Despite these benefits, at the end of the 1990s, 66% of the immigrants opting to take advantage of these programs were women, and 90% of all Filipinos in Spain worked in the domestic service, either in private homes or in the hotel industry (Pe-Pua 58). While Spain allows Filipina women increased social membership as guest workers after a few years, political and social inequalities continue to limit their cultural integration (Parreñas 101). In this way, bilateral agreements make colonial logics of paradoxical privilege that lead to exploitation visible.

As stated in the Introduction, immigrants in agriculture and domestic service sectors most clearly demonstrate the ways global regulations subjugate some workers to logics reminiscent of pre-Fordist business models and European, colonial domination. Parreñas states, “The process of labor migration consequently imposes upon Filipina domestic workers social and political barriers that limit their ability to develop a sense of full membership in their host societies. In other words, they are partial citizens of the host state” (99). Filipina migrants are able to enter Spain because of a national identity and a work scenario that are arguably advantageous; yet once in the destination country, they face marginalization and discrimination.

Migratory patterns and domestic work often result in violent scenarios that preserve colonial hierarchies supposedly dismantled through the increased mobility of citizens from formerly colonized nations. As Evelyn Nakano Glenn convincingly argues in Forced to Care, global labor migrations frequently compel poor women, many of whom are from the global south, into working in domestic service. Specifically, as Historias del Kronen and “Metro Tirso de Molina” demonstrate, the Spanish and Philippine governments collude to configure “migration regimes” and “care regimes,” which intersect to determine the ways these women are positioned and viewed throughout the world (Lutz 4, 15).³⁷ Mobility, therefore, is a prickly concept that seems to put an end to marginalization, yet allows it to continue. Today’s transnational relations replicate and modulate colonial ideologies and material relations and, thus, signal the importance of the colonial matrix of power in a globalized age. Specifically, as Spain enriches itself by creating markets in nations it once colonized, domestic workers from these lands remain economically reliant on Spaniards, who often exploit their labor and confine them to racist and exploitative epistemologies.

Juan Madrid’s “Metro Tirso de Molina” tells the tragic story of a Filipina woman named Irenea Loonda. Despite her positioning in the domestic sphere typically characterized by comfort and intimacy, Irenea experiences violence, which she painfully internalizes until she is driven to suicide. Historias del Kronen focuses on a group of college-aged men living a summer of sex, drugs and rock-and-roll. The marginal character of Tina offers a different vantage point from which to interpret their hedonistic lifestyle. A Filipina service worker in the home of Carlos, the central protagonist, Tina enters into the matrix of Historias del Kronen as a paradoxical absence and presence. She appears within the domestic sphere at moments when the novel retreats from the disturbing scenes of brutality that advance the plot. My reading of Historias del Kronen will show that, while disconnected from explicit, physical violence, Tina endures representational violence that rigidly delimits not only how she may be defined, but also interpreted. The misrepresentation of Tina makes apparent the force of the colonial matrix of power as nationals marginalize foreignness and perpetuate logics from a purportedly bygone colonial era.

Through my analyses of Historias del Kronen and “Metro Tirso de Molina,” I assert that textual depictions of family and domestic reconfigurations testify to the enormous changes Spain experienced in the 1990s, at the “end” of its Transition and the beginning and triumph of modern, European Spain. This specific moment coincides with women immigrants entering Spanish society as workers with the hope of gaining access to capital. Since both women originate from the Philippines, their presence invokes colonial relations that compel the reader to question the global inequalities fueling Spain’s new-found position of wealth and power within the turn-of-the-century world order. Therefore, both literary works reveal the impact of migration as a contradictory process of globalization that simultaneously reformulates and upholds social hierarchies. Finally, as foundational narratives of migration appearing during the 1980s and 1990s, the texts show the ways in which national narratives of modernity and progress continue to be bound up with coloniality. The novel and the short story create a space to consider the ways that affect and violence inform portrayals of immigrants in domestic economies and provide a ground for the reading the dynamics of how acceptance and rejection reinscribe colonial ideologies into national narratives written and sentiments felt in “post-national,” democratic Spain.

ON PROGRESS, OTHERNESS, AND DESENCANTO

For Luis Martín-Cabrera, “Spain’s history of modernization and backwardness was supposedly reversed in 1992” (“Postcolonial” 45). Joseba Gabilondo writes that 1992 is “the most minimal common denominator of most cultural and literary accounts of recent Spanish history” (241). Helen Graham and Antonio Sánchez signal the role of numerous 1992 celebrations in the consolidation of Spanish culture in the democratic era. Some of these events include the 500^th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage, the Olympics in Barcelona, and the inauguration of the Universal Expo in Seville.³⁸ At the same time, Yaw Agawu-Kakraba shows the ways that the nation’s Francoist past undermines its democratic present. He writes,

Spain’s Transition to democracy was supposed to herald a radical change from entrenched Franco socio-political institutions. But because most of the structures that were anchored to a Francoist past were not dismantled, the promises and euphoria engendered by the transition were brought into question. (Agawu-Kakraba 15)

What ensues is what theorists term el desencanto, defined as an expression of the postmodern condition in 1980s and 1990s and a collective disenchantment brought about by the failures of the liberal democratic system that aimed to replace Francoism (Agawu-Kakraba 53).

Gabilondo insightfully perceives in this moment a supposedly bygone nationalism characteristic of the Franco era. In Gabilondo’s view, state melancholia “neutralizes or makes disappear any other political and cultural phenomenon as peripheral or secondary to the organization of state power itself as a political problem” (248-9). While Gabilondo refers to stateless nationalisms of the Basques and Catalans, his assertions also align with my arguments about migration. Following his line of thought, alongside the perceived excessive nationalism of Basques and Catalans, immigration and the often peripheral, maybe even “unassimilable” communities it brings to the Spanish state become the problem to solve within the democratic, cosmopolitan nation rather than the state consolidation of power at the expense of Otherness.

In El mono del desencanto (1998), cultural critic Teresa Vilarós divides the Transition into two phases. The first consists of stabilizing the democracy despite Spain’s dictatorial past; these cultural strains find their articulation in Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero Molina’s failed coup d’état–el Tejerazo–on February 23, 1981 (Vilarós 2). She continues,

La segunda época, considerada como afianzamiento democrático, sigue la década que va desde 1982, año del triunfo electoral del gobierno socialista, hasta 1993, en que se firma el tratado de Maastricht y se consolida en el mapa europeo y global la política internacionalista seguida por el gobierno socialista de Felipe González.

[The second period, deemed as one of democratic strengthening, comprises the decade from 1982, the year of the socialist government’s triumph, until 1993, with the signing of the Maastricht Treaty and the consolidation of internationalist politics in the European and global map, followed by the socialist government of Felipe González.] (Vilarós 3)

Vilarós asserts that during the decade spanning 1982-1993, Spain globalized. Graham and Sánchez specifically show the significance of perceived racial Otherness–often associated with gypsies and immigrants–to the solidifying of nationalist ideals as the underside of the celebrations occurring in 1992 (414-15). As noted in the Introduction, the Ley de Extranjería is a vital dimension of the nation’s cosmopolitan, international makeover during the Transition. Part of Spain’s acceptance into the European Economic Community in 1986 was its effective management of Otherness through this law. Essentially an extension of the European Economic Community, the European Union was consolidated through the Treaty of Maastricht (1993), which sustained Spain’s role as a European border-state committed to controlling migration and Otherness for the continent.

Cultural analyses of Spain’s fraught cosmopolitanism ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Images
• Acknowledgments
• Dedication
• Introduction: Globalization, Migration, and Feeling at Home in Democratic Spain
• Chapter One: Close to Home: Filipina Domestic Workers in Democratic Spain
• Chapter Two: Homeward Bound: Coloniality and Domesticity
• Chapter Three: Home Wrecking: Death, Domesticity, and Abjection in Spanish Cinema
• Chapter Four: Broken Homes: Motherhood, Migration, and Domestic Work
• Conclusion: Home in Crisis: Migration and Community in Democratic Spain
• Works Cited
• Index
• Back Cover