How Solidarity to Immigrants Became Contested in Barcelona

• In Event: Immigration and Refugee Politics in Cities

Abstract

Since 2015, Barcelona’s government has been led by a platform coalescing movements and parties on the radical left. The city mayor Ada Colau has a biography as leading activist of the Spanish housing movement. Former protesters started ruling the city administration and often resorted to “governmental activism” – contentious actions based on the cooperation between institutional and non-institutional players – as a strategy for implementing their agenda. One might expect that this scenario is the most favorable for achieving movements’ desired outcomes. Once activists or their former fellows are incumbents of institutions, movement claims and governmental actions are likely to converge. Gains should be especially significant for social movements by and in solidarity with marginalized groups, whose victories are highly implausible without the commitment of institutional allies.

Yet the case of Barcelona shows how constrained such responsiveness can be. The most contentious topic has been that of street vendors, undocumented immigrants of usually Sub-Saharan origin who formed a very vocal collective to counter deprivation and police repression. Local incumbents have hardly alleviated these grievances, breeding contestation from various fronts. How can this outcome be explained? To answer the question, this study intersects multiple scholarly contributions in the fields of urban studies, migration studies, and social movement studies. It draws on an extensive fieldwork carried out in Barcelona in 2018 and entailing 31 semi-structured interviews. In addition, policy documents, media outlets, and the secondary literature have been extensively analyzed.

The paper shows how the pivot of controversy was the difficulty of new incumbents to match their actions with their new role. This has bred the fear of co-optation among activists, who have felt the threat of having their identity appropriated. The ties of local incumbents with activist milieus smoothed the introduction of radical demands within the institutional space, but also deprived social-movement activists of their raison d'être to some extent. Somehow paradoxically, responsiveness to demand-makers produced both an empowerment and a replacement of social movements. Relatedly, social movements suffered from the absorption of their former leaders in the administrative machine. Activist networks indeed became less resourceful, as well as less capable of deciphering and affecting institutional dynamics.

Discontent has been extremely pronounced in the case of street vendors. By seeking to embrace their demands, the city government spurred an antagonistic reaction from the side of this collective, because the wish of not being patronized – by allies and opponents alike – has been at the basis of their process of politicization. Political self-determination is, in fact, at the core of these immigrants’ collective identity. From this perspective, immigrant activists face acute dilemmas, being supporters indispensable as much as detrimental. Relatedly, the confrontational attitude of street vendors was also driven by the lack of far-reaching responses to their grievances. Assorted actors participated at urban policy-making beside activists and their institutional allies, including higher tiers of government, opposition parties, police forces, shop-keepers, and mainstream media. Those having a preference for the restriction of immigrant rights strategically coalesced to prevent any substantive policy change. This forcefully points at the limits that progressive local administrations face when coping with global societal trends whose governance lie beyond their full jurisdiction.

Author

• Raffaele Bazurli, Queen Mary, University of London