My school this year is in a part of Madrid with a bad reputation. Decades ago, Vallecas was a separate village, or pueblo, and the original town center is still there, complete with a brick church towering over the square and round white fountains between a line of ferny green trees. But now the neighborhood is home to immigrants, working-class Spaniards, and a lot of bad publicity. My school is in the "new" part of town, so I had never seen the Vallecas of stereotype. Sure, I had seen some vacant lots and young men hanging out on the street corner with too much time on their hands, but it didn't seem as bad as the stories. Then one day at lunch I took a walk and discovered the gypsy settlement.
If you walk past the outlet mall and circle the roundabout crowned with a giant fountain, you enter an older neighborhood. On one side of the street are groups of modest apartment buildings, many with green vinyl awnings extended to protect the occupants from the sun. On the other side of the street is a strange, litter-strewn field that houses a small complex of eight or ten-story apartment buildings. It's clear that no one lives there; most of the windows and doors are completely filled in with red brick, and the doorless ground floor entrances gape like toothless mouths. Some of the balconies are full of rusty detritus from the last residents, heedless piles as if the people left in a hurry: children´s toys, frying pans, flower pots. But other balconies have green plants perched on the railings and fresh laundry hanging out to dry. And if you wait long enough, you can sometimes see the dim face of a woman or child in the gloom, flitting past like a shadow.
It´s hard to separate generalizations from prejudice about gypsies, or as they prefer to be called, Roma. Many people here have negative ideas they aren´t shy about expressing: gypsies deal drugs, they have too many children, they are "conflictive" neighbors, they subject themselves and their families to intolerable living conditions, most of the men are in jail, they´re not to be trusted, and so on. It´s true that in many respects, Roma tradition (at least as far as I've been able to observe) is starkly at odds from Western culture. Girls do often marry young, at 16 or 17, and it's true that many Roma are visibly not involved in the traditional economy. In my neighborhood, I often see Roma men trolling the dumpsters for scrap metal to sell or furniture to fix up or use. When people clean out their apartments, they usually leave potentially useful items next to the dumpster, rather than throwing them in: a tennis racket, a pile of neatly-folded clothes, a stack of pots and pans. Such items nearly always vanish within a day. Several of my Roma students attend school very sporadically. I can´t pretend to understand or explain it, but it´s clear that something is going on in portions of the Roma community that is very different from the way most Spaniards live.
According to an article in El Mundo, the European Union´s Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) recently conducted a study of 25,000 Roma about the situation of nomadic Roma communities in the EU. The study concluded that the Roma are the most discriminated-against ethnic group in Europe, ahead of both Jews and Arabs. One in four Roma who participated in the study had suffered threats, attacks, or severe harassment in the previous 12 months. 75% of those surveyed had experienced some type of discrimination over the past year in areas like housing, health care, employment, and education.
Such a study in Spain would likely uncover similar stories, although it's important to note the country has received praise from the EU for the success of its efforts to integrate the Roma. In 2009, the FRA conducted an in-depth study about the access the estimated 600,000 Spain-dwelling Roma have to housing. The final report, titled “Housing Conditions of Roma and Travellers, concluded that:
“Access to decent and quality housing appears impaired by economic difficulties, different cultural patterns, and extensive discrimination and prejudices. These different causes many times have a cumulative effect on housing exclusion.”
“The Roma continue to be the main inhabitants of shanty towns and substandard forms of housing in Spain, a situation which currently appears to affect around 12 per cent of the Roma population in Spain. This represents a decrease of 19 points from 1991. The most extreme examples of housing exclusion seem to be currently affecting around 4.6 per cent of the Roma population in Spain, a percentage much lower than the one provided in 2002 by the same source, which estimated it to be between 12 and 14 per cent. These changes are obvious signs of a positive evolution.” (p. 4)
Those final statistics are hopeful, but it's still hard for me to walk past the abandoned-but-lived-in apartment buildings where the gypsies live. The town of Vallecas has recently decided to put a park on that land, so for the past few months there have been roaring bulldozers and yellow Bobcats skittering over the bare dirt. Some of the older, freestanding houses have already been torn down, but for the moment, the abandoned apartment buildings still stand. So too does one ramshackle house, now surrounded on all sides by a tidy brick bicycle path. It's a strange sight: the pristine park is encroaching on its spot, but the house fairly shouts resistance, a long string of laundry fluttering in the breeze like so many battle flags.