As a latino that believes to be reasonably enlightened in feminist matters (whatever such sentence might possibly mean), I have to contend with a troubled heritage. We come from a long tradition that seems incapable of placing women but in two categories, virgins or whores. And don’t get me wrong: it is not so that latinas fit nowadays, or used to fit, in those two. Not at all. It’s easy to argue (and I dare say prove) that latina has wielded more power than in many other societies. Perhaps that is why the men obliterate this reality creating the fairy tale of the virgin/whore categories.
The nice thing of being a migrant is that we can afford a detached view of the society that received us, at least for a while. The less nice thing of being a migrant is that soon you discover your Schrodinger’s cat kind of existence. We migrants are so industrious and hard workers that we are a threat for the work of the residents. We came here to steal the jobs that rightfully belong to the ones that arrived before. On the other side, we are also lazy and came to the european welfare paradise in order to milk the social services, not clocking a minute of work anymore. So yes, just like this cat, our existence is in the realm of probabilities, in a cloud of probabilities that make our real self unknowable: lazy-industrious-lazy-industrious-lazy….
Now, if you actually follow some of the european debate on migration, and you happen to lean to the left side of the political spectrum, you might argue that this Schrodinger thing is the view of the conservatives and the right-wingers. Nothing like that on the left!
Alas, the left and the progressives have their own undefined status for us migrants.
On the left, and until recently in my beloved Green party, the migrants are pitiful beings that deserve emancipation. Or they are the salvation of the current society, bringing diversity and preparing us all to deal with an increasingly complex and diverse world.
Actually I am not sure which Schrodinger’s box I do prefer, the lefty or the right one.
What I am sure is that, just as no latina is the Virgin Mary or the whore of Babilonia, no migrant fits in the categories that people seems to have created. The best thing is that pretty much every other european would recognize the absurdity of these boxes. Just as any latino knows in his heart, women are as diverse themselves as you want. And yet, europeans are still trying to navigate the question of “dealing with the migrants”, question that in itself implies that “the migrant” is a concept that has at least a little bit of coherence, and is meaningful when applied to a bunch of people.
Which is obviously not.