17 - From Racial Contaminant to Nutrient in Spain’s Ecological Future

Summary

Since the 1990s, the racial landscape of Spain has dramatically shifted as a result of migration via the entrance of immigrants and the exodus of Spaniards as a result of the global economic crisis. The influx of racialized migrants (and subsequently, citizens) over the last 30 years has led to the development of racist metaphors that reference natural disasters such as floods, avalanches, and seismic phenomena, all of which are events that are becoming more common owing to climate change. In addition, in the media, politics, and cultural production, immigrants of color have been referred to as scum or pollution that restricts the air (i.e., the lives) of good (to be read as white) Spanish citizens. These metaphors refer both materially and symbolically to events associated over the years with threat and destruction in order to promote xenophobic and racist ideologies within the national imaginary. Such discourses have led to violence as in the famous race riots in El Ejido in 2000. These metaphors thereby demonstrate the existence of a necropolitical structure, in which the Spanish State and Spanish society more largely have facilitated a system in which racialized migrants live in constant precarity. These people live, and in many cases, die to sustain Spain’s agricultural and oenological industries, thereby stimulating the national economy. I propose that the narrative of toxicity that is used against immigrants (particularly Black and Arab ones) is actually a projection not only of the Spanish nation state’s fragility as a result of its ecocide domestically, but also of the toxicity it spews abroad by operating as a Fortress Europe nation guided by capitalism. This projection necessitates a dependence on migrants to sustain the national ecosystem in both literal and figurative terms. Thus, given the use of these environmental metaphors and their real-life implications for racialized people, there is a real need for racial justice and environmental justice to go hand in hand.

Various scholars have explored how rampant consumerism in the Global North has subjugated those who live in the Global South. As Srnicek and Williams note:

Capital requires a particular type of surplus population: cheap, docile, and pliable. Without these characteristics, this excess of humanity becomes a problem for capital.