Hosting in a time of hostility: Ethnographic reflections on Ukrainian refugees arriving in Spain

• In Event: Methodology and inmigration

Abstract

This paper is about the lives of various Ukrainian families, some of whom I came to host in my home in Madrid in Spain, and others whom I came to know through the experience of ‘hosting’. From March 2022, when my Ukrainian family arrived, through until the close of the year, I vigorously documented the feelings, experiences, hopes and ambitions of they went through as well as several Ukrainian families immediately after they had left their country in search of safety and stability as an uninvited war began in their home country. This paper is not only about their brutal experiences of leaving the Ukraine and the challenges of starting a new life in Spain but it is also about, as a consequence of their arrival, how I inadvertently became plugged into an emerging community of other hosts and their Ukrainian families in my home town. Over the course of 10 months, I got to know and met regularly with both hosts and their families at local events and parties, was regularly called upon to look after Ukrainian children and entertain them and was even asked by the mayor to run an association for the new compatriots in my local town. This unparalleled access allowed me to intimately document not only how the families left, under what circumstances and what led them to Spain but also the painful teething issues associated with the sudden pressures of integration in Spanish cultural life.

Author

• Daniel Briggs, Northumbria University