Naming a Collective Cause in a Foreign Land

When you are out in the open and draw on collective memory to substantiate rights or a sense of belonging, speak with our own voice as we have spoken to you, so that those who listen may know that their words are rooted in the blood of ancestors, and are the seeds of those who are no longer here.

– Abuelo Zenón, 201711.Abuelo Zenón ‘personifies, symbolises and expresses the collective memory of the peoples of African descent of the Great Pacific Rim, settled in the territorial space we now call Ecuador’. Juan García and Catherine Walsh, Pensar sembrando/Sembrar pensando con el Abuelo Zenón, Quito: UASB-Abya Yala, 2017, pp. 9–10.

White is a political definition, which represents historical, political and social privileges of a certain group that has access to dominant structures and institutions of society.

– Grada Kilomba, 200822.Portuguese interdisciplinary artist and writer based in Berlin. Her work is based on memory, trauma, race, gender and the decolonization of knowledge and narratives. Her first book, Plantation Memories (2008), is a fundamental source of reference for anti-colonial and anti-racist thought.

If I was named Mikhail at birth, it was after one of the Communist party secretaries,
of that utopia, we have two stories, a common space: the Dominican, the political. One does not enter politics solely out of conviction, but because it affects you, because you have been harmed.

– Johan Mijail,201633.Johan Mijail is an Afro-Dominican writer, performer and sexual dissidence activist.

The foreign land is Madrid.44.‘Políticas del nombrar’ (Politics of Naming) is a collective research and cultural mediation project being developed by Paola de la Vega (Ecuador) and Dagmary Olívar (Venezuela/Spain). The reflections that we share in this article are the result of the research residency Notar II, coordinated by hablarenarte with the support of the Museo Reina Sofía and the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation, that we both undertook in Madrid in May and June 2023. Like many southern European cities, it is a complex space where historical narratives charged with the most conservative nationalism converge with those of past and present revolutions.55.From 2 May 1808 and the city’s fight against the Napoleonic invasion, to the battle scenes of the Spanish Civil War; from the anti-Franco resistance to the latest one, 2011’s anti-austerity 15-M Movement, known as the movement of the indignados (the outraged), with the Puerta del Sol in the heart of Madrid as its epicentre. Governed by the right, in recent years the city has been subjected to policies that promote a neoliberal model of community, along with ideals and policies that threaten the environment, as well as the city’s forms of coexistence, ways of thinking, and pre-existing diverse and dissident practices-.

In terms of current migratory flows, Spain’s geopolitical position, its proximity to the coasts of North and West Africa and the two Spanish autonomous cities in North African territory, Ceuta and Melilla, all make the country a point of entry for migrants. The sea is not the only conduit for movements from the Global South; airports are the main gateways in Spain, and cities the most frequent destinations. The Spanish capital is a meeting point, sometimes a place of transit, and also a place of residence for people of various nationalities and ethnic and affective communities who come here in search of a future. It is in this city that the cultural and anti-racist collectives and projects whose names and stories have been the driving force behind our research have evolved. Madrid is the setting for these encounters and the intellectual eddies they have created during this process.

The nascent research project ‘Políticas del nombrar’ (Politics of Naming) emerged out of a friendship, shared activism and common questions that we both represent and embody: we are both racialized women, both connected to Madrid in different ways through memory, migration, social ties and the colonial wound that we share through our other closely related work and research. For us, migrant and racialized cultural collectives in Madrid are not a subject or object of research but a shared means of activism, a way of surviving and coexisting in order to make sense of our existence in this world. The concerns that we address in this research pertain to us: they are part of us, of our cultural practices, insofar as both of us have belonged, and still belong, to cultural collectives from their outsets, and we have taken part in striving to name them, and in the political exercise that this implies. We also understand the precariousness of the cultural sector that we experience in our being and our bodies, among other factors that intersect to determine the development of a project of this kind.

Otherwise, our different backgrounds and research complement each other in this project: Paola brings to bear community cultural management and research on decolonial/anticolonial cultural policies and management, especially her doctoral thesis ‘Genealogías para una gestión cultural crítica’ (Genealogies for Critical Cultural Management). One of the conceptual principles of this research project has been how forms of concrete utopianism in collective cultural action delineate transformative processes of critical cultural management. Dagmary brings her experience as a Venezuelan migrant living in Spain since 2002, and in the city of Madrid until 2018, to the project. Creator in 2008 of YoSoyElOtro Asociación Cultural (IAmTheOther Cultural Association),66.YoSoyElOtro Asociación Cultural (IAmTheOther Cultural Association) is a nonprofit organization founded in 2008 in the city of Madrid, supported by a team of people with diverse backgrounds, knowledges and skills in academia, cultural and artistic promotion and social migration issues, with collective lines of work. More information: yosoyelotro.org. she manages projects that combine academia, cultural promotion and social issues around migration. The association’s lines of research are centred around the relationship between migration and culture in Spain: the impact of cultural agents of migrant and racialized origin on the cultural ecosystem, especially in Latin American and Caribbean communities, through research, publication, the creation of archives and the recording and preservation of our work in the host society, among other activities. Along with the book of the same name,77.Dagmary Graterol Olívar, El Otrx: arte, cultura y migración en la ciudad de Madrid (The Other: Art, Culture and Migration in the City of Madrid), Madrid: La Parcería Edita/YoSoyElOtro, 2021. the project ‘El Otrx: arte, cultura y migración en la ciudad de Madrid’ (The Other: Art, Culture and Migration in the City of Madrid) was one of the catalysts of this research.

Why ‘Políticas del nombrar’? The work carried out for the book El Otrx and other projects in which Dagmary has participated provided an initial mapping of ideas, positionings and previous analyses of various migrant and racialized cultural collectives in Madrid. Of these, we have selected those whose forms of autonomy use a signifier to express the collective community, strengthen epistemic legacies that produce past-to-present links (ancestral memory and delocalized, diasporic thought), generate political identifications and challenge meanings.

1) Ayllu, a word that comes from Quechua, means extended family, a form of social organization of Andean peoples

2) Liwai, comprising two words of Mandarin Chinese, means (li) inside and (wai) outside

3) [La] Parcería comes from the Colombian parlache, derived from the Brazilian word parceiro, meaning friend, colleague

To these three, we add: Akiba Art African Gallery and Pretendemos gitanizar el mundo (Let’s Gypsyfy the World). In this text, we will explore each of these forms and acts of naming of these collectives in greater depth.

Colectivo Ayllu ‘defines itself as a collaborative research and artistic-political action group of migrant, racialized, sexual and gender dissident agents from the ex-colonies’.88.See instagram.com/colectivo_ayllu. Liwai promotes actions focused on the Chinese community in Spain through intercultural mediation, and also acts as a ‘bridge’ between the community and the rest of Spanish society.99.See liwai.org. La Parcería cultural centre – a thought, creation and action collective formed by migrants to develop cultural projects within and around the street, the neighbourhood and public space.1010.laparceria.org. Akiba Art African Gallery takes its name from Fang, one of the many languages that coexist with Spanish in Equatorial Guinea, in which akiba means thank you.1111.facebook.com/afroakiba. It is an art project that promotes African and African diaspora art through exhibitions and cultural activities. Finally, Pretendemos gitanizar el mundo is an association that works to spread a decolonial counter-narrative to the story that has been told about the history and culture of el Pueblo Gitano, the Roma people, in Spain.1212.gitanizate.wordpress.com.

Broadly speaking, in the naming of the five collectives we worked with in this research we used these following four strands of thought, interweaving them, among others, to enunciate and define their political agency:

1) They suggest a sense, or senses, of self-organization; of linking up, complicity and above all of family in the diaspora: that of the parcería, comprised of parces or parceiros (intimate friends, companions, accomplices); or that of migrant and racialized sexual dissidents united in a chosen family – the ayllu.

2) They form collective alliances to promote platforms that claim spaces for the visibility and representation of racialized cultural practices and artistic productions which are materially and symbolically undervalued in a cultural field and a society that still finds it difficult to recognize itself as diverse and to question its whiteness. For example, for Martina Mitogo and Marian Davies of Akiba Art African Gallery, giving visibility to artists from the African diaspora in Madrid is a form of active struggle, of artivism, of pluralizing representations and narratives in the city’s visual arts scene.1313.During the interview with Martina Mitogo and Marian Davies of Akiba Art African Gallery referenced below, they define their work as ‘artivismo’ (artivism). Their usage can be understood in this context to refer to a form of anti-racist struggle through promoting artists of African origin.

3) They generate an in-between zone where a third space of creativity can emerge. This indeterminate space, or ch'ixi, is a variegated fabric, a stained grey.1414.See Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Un mundo ch'ixi es posible. Ensayos desde un presente en crisis (A Ch'ixi World is Possible. Essays from a Present in Crisis), Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2018. It is a contradictory fabric, weaving and teasing out spaces of representation and production of symbolic references; dignified conditions for precarious migrant cultural workers; recognition in the spheres of power and decision-making; and the constant struggle against the everyday structural racism that operates in the Spanish state’s white institutional cultural hierarchies. Activating this in-between zone, as Xirou Xiao (Liwai) points out in the interview referenced below, also means being in a permanent state of movement and making a displacement between what is supposed to be inside and outside. It means working in a steady, organized manner. It’s like weaving bridges through the air.

4) They articulate community forms in which epistemic legacies of subalternized and racialized cultures are reclaimed; this is explained by Silvia Agüero and Nicolás Jiménez of Pretendemos gitanizar el mundo, with regard to the values of the Gypsy Roma people as a vital, cultural and political beacon of their actions. These are non-violence (the Roma people have never waged war against any other people); biophilia (love for life); and Roma solidarity (their sense of community).

All the names of these collectives are constructed from intellectual legacies, political trajectories of anti-racist and anti-colonial struggles, commonality and reproduction of common life. We understand these relocalized and in-transit signifiers as names that refer to the thinking-and-doing of these racialized and migrant collectives and cultural spaces in Madrid.1515.This is one of the ontological dualisms of the civilizational order and of modernity-coloniality that separates thinking (intellect) and doing (body). We use thinking-and-doing, appreciating that ‘doing’ with our body and making with our hands produces knowledge. Intellectual and manual labour are not dual but interdependent. In resonance with Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, these forms of naming are transposed from geographical thinking into situated thinking, a vital epistemological gesture that dismantles ‘the historical artificiality of the map’ and resituates ‘a locus of thought in a particular and material location on the planet’.1616.Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Un mundo ch'ixi es posible, 2018, p. 89.

Our interest in the politics of naming distances itself from an exercise of the ‘recognition’ of other epistemologies and rather seeks to lay the foundations for the construction of tools of mediation (between museum institutions and racialized migrant cultural collectives in Spain), with the name used as such a device. Hence, we investigate how the names of these self-managed organizations resituate epistemic legacies of diverse languages (Mandarin Chinese, Fang, Quechua), and colloquial language (Parlache, Medellín-Colombia) in the Madrid migra context.1717.A simplified name for the self-identified migrant community, developed from the anti-racist movement. Also, how they generate other acts of naming – such as the coinage gitanizar (to gypsyfy), a new verb (not included in the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española1818.The dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy, the source of reference for the ‘correct’ use of the language spoken officially or co-officially in twenty-two countries.) – that (in a society with a centuries-old anti-Gypsy tradition) could open up possibilities for testing mediation tools and anti-racist policies. That is, we ask how names, with their power of instituting, could expand semantic fields for the development of mediation tools and the production of new institutionalities. In the footsteps of Mario Rufer,1919.Mario Rufer (coord.), La colonialidad y sus nombres: conceptos clave (Coloniality and its Names: Key Concepts), Buenos Aires: CLACSO siglo veintiuno editores, 2023. we propose a rethinking of signifiers, their leaks of meaning, the blurred contours between instituted thought and instituting forces.

In the course of this research, we identified two ways of naming these collective practices: denotative and connotative. Both are ways of generating a name that represents a common project, contains action and political value. The denotative form uses words that objectively describe the elements that a name contains, i.e. the chosen words do not require interpretation or additional information to be understood, for example: Asociación de venezolanos en Madrid (Association of Venezuelans in Madrid). However, it is the second, connotative approach that interests us because of its power to create layers of interaction between territories, temporalities, semantics, knowledges, identities, and much more. It is these names which contain political potency in themselves and are the focus of our research.

The intention thus to name oneself must be an agreement circumscribed to specific conditions marked by the context. The places where these names germinate are key, as means and ends for their emergence. In Madrid, despite having received exiles from Equatorial Guinea and the Southern Cone since the 1960s and 1970s, and economic migrants since Spain’s accession to the European Union in 1986, the conception of migrant subjects of migrant and racialized origin is far from being understood in terms of effective cultural and ethno-racial diversity, that is, as a characteristic of contemporary Spanish society. Migrant and racialized subjects are regarded as unskilled labour, never as political subjects, much less as cultural and artistic agents. We are almost always questioned and interpreted as the foreign, the Other. Otherness and the idea of otherizing are common ways of understanding diversity. This otherness goes beyond foreignness and is projected onto a Spanish ethnic group that has suffered discrimination for centuries, the Roma.

Cultural and artistic work in Spain is characterized by the precariousness of the system and its actors. This becomes more complicated for migrant and racialized agents, precisely the type of people we have interacted with in this research project. Thus, our experiences, our bodies, the bodies of those who participated in it, and the context of their circumstances were determining factors in conducting this research and its methodologies, which were shaped by various factors over the course of our work. For one, the material circumstances of the research shifted: it was necessary to change the premises used in the initial process, to negotiate the payment of fees to the collectives with whom we spoke during the research process, and to adapt bibliographies and references. We also had to make the process more flexible because of the city, its intensity and the impact of these factors on the people who make up the collectives. The result was a methodology of care and affection, where the act of doing research would create a space for being together and for learning about each other: listening as a political gesture for the construction of common thought and a space for imagining possibilities.

This listening took place through unstructured interviews that were recorded to collect information. The dialogues took place around the dining-room table at Planta Alta (hablarenarte’s artists residency space), accompanied by food, drink, curiosity and affection. The hustle and bustle of a city like Madrid made it difficult to schedule meetings with cultural agents, who are almost always dealing with higher-than-average precarity. After numerous attempts, we realized that we needed to find an appropriate space that would suit their agendas and our way of working, where we could build trust. So, having a meal together became the ideal setting for the meeting. Here is a fragment of a text written by Paola de la Vega for the residency’s closing event, which summarizes this affective methodological practice of care and bonding:

A dining table can be a school, a place of learning. At a dining table, productive time – that part of the day in a city where no one has time for anything else – can stop. A dining table can also be a space for healing and consolation. A dining table embraces the origin of a project. A dining table is a joyful place for an encounter of resistance and celebration of life. A dining table links a past that lies ahead with a future that we can look back on.

From these long conversations, which are quoted throughout this text, we have brought together ideas with which to unpack each of the organization’s position of collective enunciation and some traces of their politics of naming themselves here:

Colectivo Ayllu: Ayllu allowed us to return to the theme of community; a community, as they say in Ecuador, of an ayllu that is formed to make choices for the benefit of that community … and on the other hand, from the perspective of the diaspora, we saw the ayllu as the unassigned, non-blood family, a family of sexual dissidence. In using this name, we are not displacing the territory from the Andes to Spain, but there is a conceptual displacement, a recovery of a memory, of a legacy.

Liwai: We position ourselves as a bridge between the Chinese community and the rest of society. Our language and methodology are one of intercultural mediation that seeks to build a bridge … . Li is inside and wai is outside, so we believe that we as a platform can constantly move from one point: inside-to-outside, inside, outside … . And from there we use critical thinking to question who is inside, who is outside, who decides who is inside, who decides who is outside, and many discourses related to this.

Akiba: Africa is the cradle of humanity; that’s where akiba comes from: thank you for what you give us, thank you for what we are, thanks to Africa we are here. Akiba is thanks in Fang, the language of Equatorial Guinea … Akiba is above all a way of giving visibility to artists of African origin, it is a form of ‘artivism’ … we want that cultural diversity that is lacking in many spaces; it is also a way of bringing people closer to the other.

Pretendemos gitanizar el mundo: When we formed the association, we realized that all associations call themselves The Gypsy Association of this, or The Gypsy Association of that … without any sense of what they want or what they do … . We thought a lot about what the association was going to be called … . That’s why we want to gitanizar, we want to gypsyfy the world to make a bigger, more human community. In 1749 the name gitano (gypsy) was forbidden and calling oneself a gitano was prohibited. It was said that we were a sect of idle people and that many people might join it. And of course, many people can join it. How do we gypsyfy ourselves? Make a gypsy friend, live with a gypsy, buy from a gypsy…

La Parcería: In a meeting to discuss the project and in these conversations we came up with the word parce (pair up) and our Brazilian colleague said that it also exists in Portuguese: parce, parceiro, parcería … .2020.Parcero and parce come from parceiro, which in Portuguese means friend, companion, accomplice, peer. According to linguistic research, the word was brought to Medellín-Colombia in the 1980s: ‘Many of the young people from the marginal sectors of Medellín and its metropolitan area went to work in the drug trafficking kitchens on the border between Colombia and Brazil’, according to philologist Luz Stella Castañeda Naranjo. Then, she points out, ‘they brought the word back in Spanish: parceiro became parcero’. See bbc.com. That’s where La Parcería came from and that’s where it was given its name, because it incorporated the Portuguese world as well as us as Colombians.

Finally, we believe that the names of migrant cultural collectives contain the active potential of forms of community and political organization; re-semanticizing them within the context of the diaspora has cracked open the map of cultural activity in Madrid and, in the struggle for the rights of migrant and racialized communities, could also pierce other structures, allowing alternative possibilities of institutional practice to be imagined. If, as Jesús Carrillo points out, agujerear (to make holes, to drill, to crack open) is to ‘break through the barrier that separates the inside from the outside’,2121.Jesús Carrillo, El museo: ¿un proyecto inacabado? (The Museum: An Unfinished Project?), Madrid: La Oveja Roja, 2022. it is worth asking what tools would allow a name to be used as a political force to crack the wall. What concrete ways might there be to interconnect different epistemic legacies found in the naming processes of these collectives into a common, porous tool with which future interconnections can be articulated?

We plan to develop this first research overview into a practical mediation tool. For the moment, we are certain of only a small number of points. The first is that we believe in the epistemic, semantic and political power of the names of these collectives to pierce, cause cracks and penetrate institutions. These names are a design resource, anti-racist tools of mediation between museum institutions and migrant and racialized communities (whether they are situated in professional cultural practices or not.) Secondly, that these mediation tools enable the attainment of cultural rights as a way to fight for other social or economic rights. When we think of cultural rights, we are reminded of the urgency of intervening in the unequal power relations, marked by structural racism, in the field of culture in the Spanish state, which has reproduced hierarchies of modernity-coloniality for centuries. We know that the recognition of cultural diversity in institutional frameworks is easily instrumentalized in the accumulation of prestige and the perpetuation of white and elitist privilege, even more so at a time when the decolonial is a conceptual fashion. For this reason, we believe that an anti-racist tool should not stagnate in affirmative policies (although we consider them necessary), nor should it be ‘inclusive’ or aim only to break ‘the glass ceiling’, but rather it should make deep cracks to remove the colonial structures that sustain museum institutions.2222.How are historical narratives, works and objects of extractivist practices deposited in museums being removed as the current Spanish Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, announced last January before the Parliament’s Cultural Commission that the Ministry would review the collections of the State Museums in order to ‘decolonize’ Spanish museums? In short, this tool must be free from any form of tokenism, ‘a strategy used by white supremacy to generate the illusion of inclusion and redistribution while maintaining the same structures of power and domination’, as Francisco Godoy of the Ayllu collective points out.2323.Francisco Godoy, Usos y costumbres de los blancos (Mores and Customs of White People), Chiapas, Ard Ceiba, Valencia: Ona Ediciones, 2023. Nor can we forget that inequality in culture is also radically material, affecting lives and bodies from which value is still extracted for the symbolic accumulation that benefits only a few.

Inequality in the representation of ethno-racial diversity and the reproduction of forms of racism in institutional frameworks and cultural policies in the Community of Madrid has been analysed in the 2022 report undertaken by José Ariza and Yeison García and edited by Felipa Manuela, La diversidad étnico racial en las instituciones culturales de la Comunidad de Madrid (Ethnic-Racial Diversity in the Cultural Institutions of the Community of Madrid).2424.The intention to rethink the colonial legacy of these collections has major opponents, but it represents a possibility of historical reparation that, beyond the complexity of its process, symbolizes a revision of the colonial past in order to generate new narratives of the present and future of a country that currently does not see itself as culturally or ethnically diverse. See José Ariza and Yeison García, La diversidad étnico-racial en las instituciones culturales de la Comunidad de Madrid (Ethnic-Racial Diversity in the Cultural Institutions of the Community of Madrid), Madrid: FelipaManuela, 2022, felipamanuela.org. The study recommends cultural institutions carry out diagnoses of labour and salary equality from an ethnic-racial perspective, as well as the representation of diversity in cultural programming. Other recommendations are the implementation of ethnic-racial equality plans in policies for the acquisition of works and exhibitions, and work with migrants and racialized people as audiences. With regard to organizations, it recommends political participation of associative networks in cultural institutions that are permeable to these institutional transformations.

One possible way to build on reports such as this one is precisely the construction of a mediation tool that, based on the epistemic force of the name, becomes a path to a deeper understanding of these communities of cultural action and political thought. Deeper understanding of their legacies and history, their capacities for creative and community organizing, their demands as cultural workers, and also as a possibility for the creation of egalitarian and anti-racist cultural spaces. As Dagmary Olívar has pointed out, the cultural participation of migrants in the host society is a determining factor in generating a process of recognition and socialization, and also because culture is the only area where migrants can exercise a certain form of citizenship, especially if they are in an ‘irregular administrative situation’.2525.‘No human being is illegal’ is one of the slogans of anti-racism. For this reason, when a foreign person decides to stay in Spain without having the administrative authorization to do so, because he or she does not or no longer meets the conditions for entry, stay or residence in Spanish territory, this status is known as an ‘irregular administrative situation’. This is the situation in which many migrants residing in Spain find themselves. Culture is where we think about ourselves and create ‘other’ ways of being and belonging beyond the administrative and professional situation in which society and our own situation places us.


Translator: Jennie Gant