By Alicia Oliver.
Liliana Aragón Castro, originally from Chihuahua, Mexico, arrived in Barcelona 8 years ago to do a master’s degree. Now, she is responsible for the Neighbors by Neighbors project of the Hélia Association.
He studied International Relations. Before arriving in our country, she lived with her family: husband, two boys and a girl in the city of Villahermosa, in the south of the country, where she worked for many years on women’s issues, from the public administration and learner of community feminism, widespread in Latin America. From there they applied for study grants and so she was able to study the Interuniversity Master’s Degree in Women’s, Gender and Citizenship Studies at the University of Barcelona.
You came to study a master’s degree, and what made you stay here?
We arrived in September 2015 with my two sons and daughter who were then 6, 8 and 10 years old. And when we finished our master’s degree, due to family issues and problems of insecurity in Mexico, we decided to start looking for opportunities to stay. It was not easy, however, from the privilege of having a student card, to make the transition to resident and for five people, it is super complicated. You need to invest a lot of time and also a lot of resources, including financial ones. And it’s what we women live. And I say this from a point of privilege, but even so, the Aliens Act crosses us in many ways. And it’s all very complicated, like a fish biting its tail: you can’t start working in Spain if you don’t have an employment contract, but nobody will hire you if you don’t have a work permit. In the end I managed to get a contract as a domestic worker so that I could then have residence and start looking for a job in my professional field.
The recognition of professional training in origin is quite a challenge, isn’t it?
Having our university education recognized costs a lot. I have many female colleagues who are working at the level of care and we know that in their countries of origin they were engineers, graduates, workers in companies… And when they arrive here, they are not recognized and end up working as precarious carers, precisely because of all that cross them: discrimination, racism… what is the matter in this pyramid of how capitalism is built: to the racialized bodies, what matters to them is to take care of the elderly and the children in this country, if you come from America Latin
But you were able to overcome that logic, weren’t you?
I had the good fortune to start working at Associació Hèlia, which is a well-known feminist association in Barcelona, as it has a history of 15 years. I started working in April 2021 as head of the Social Action area, and specifically as coordinator of the Neighbors for Neighbors project.
From the beginning it was like a very important connection since this project is like the soul of the association, because this is how Hélia was born. 15 years ago in the neighborhood of the Sagrada Família, women like its founder Montserrat Vilà, accompanied other women so that they would not be alone on this path towards recovery from sexist violence.
What exactly does the project consist of?
It is about giving support to women in situations of sexist violence in their recovery process, from a community empowerment perspective. The volunteers, based on training and appropriate monitoring by professionals, accompany the women to the various actions and processes they must go through: accompany them to the courts, to police headquarters, to visits with lawyers or lawyers, to medical visits, to do administrative procedures, to social services…
Veïnes per Veïnes is a community network formed by groups of professional women and volunteers who act as active agents to achieve neighborhoods free of violence towards women.
How many volunteers are there?
When I joined two years ago, there were about 30 volunteers, and actively about 15, since it is not a traditional volunteering. In other words, it’s not about being a volunteer on Tuesdays from 8 to 2, since we respond to the needs of women. If the trial is on Tuesday at 12, you must be here. If the medical appointment is on Thursday at 4 pm, you must be there that day. Therefore, what we do is respond based on the availability of our volunteers. And in these years, the network of volunteers has increased and we are now more than 250 volunteers. So it has grown, it has consolidated and we have managed to articulate with many of the public services in the circuit of sexist violence in the city and also in the province of Barcelona, since we are derived from the SIES (Specialized Intervention Services), of shelters in the city and other territories.
What kind of accompaniments do you do?
Approximately, 50% of the accompaniments we do annually are in the courthouses, but you also have to do administrative procedures that have to do with this process. For example, if they have to process financial aid; if you need to go to the SOC; to the treasury; to open a bank account… a series of administrative procedures that must be done and this is community support. Hélia, with this project, responds to these needs, and we also have psychologists who provide more professional support and attention, and then links to women in some community workshops.
It’s an exchange of knowledge, the network is mutual support, it’s a horizontal accompaniment and between equals, where women will not judge other women. In other words, they will be here to be that friendly neighbor, who supports and accompanies you.
How many accompaniments do you do per year?
When I arrived in Hélia, around 40 accompaniments were made annually. Last year we did over 250. And so far this year we’ve had more than 200. This has to do with how this project is solving the needs, both of women and of services, and also, how there are women who want to do something actively against gender violence, something more than network activism social. Of course, you also need to have a privilege of time to be a volunteer, and some resource, such as, for example, assuming the cost of public transport.
What profile do the volunteers have?
There are retired women, many young students, for example in criminology, law… who are already super sensitized and some young professionals too. This network is made up of very diverse women, of course there are also migrant women who are in the volunteer network who also have the privilege of having the time and resources to accompany and be here.
It’s true that those who are even a year younger are super involved and do a lot of accompaniments, and suddenly, they have a schedule, and they can’t continue doing it since the accompaniments are usually in the mornings. But even though there is no such availability they still stay online, in the Whats App group. Because it is a network that works very well and very interesting information is shared, and above all, it is a safe space.
And the profile of the women you accompany?
80% of them are mostly migrant women. They are the women who take us away from public services. Most of them come to us from the SARA (Care, Recovery and Reception Service) of the Barcelona City Council, or from the shelters, the Hospital Clínic, the PIADS (Women’s Information and Care Points) , from the SIES, from the Mossos d’Esquadra, from the City of Justice… These are women who do not have resources, who do not have a network, who have a language barrier that prevents them from completing a procedure or lack of knowledge about the digital network, now that almost all procedures must be done online.
It is the profile of women we usually accompany. Women who have been victims of, for example, forced marriages. Many do not know the city or public transport. And they are accompanied, for example, to the appointment with the SARA psychologist so that they can make the same journey, independently, next time.
Where is the project now?
On the one hand, Veïnes per Veïnes has been able to be replicated in other places, independently, by other groups of women whom we have accompanied in the process. The first place where it was replicated was in the Barri de la Salut, in Gràcia. It is also being done in Sagrera, L’Hospitalet, Igualada, Reus and Tarragona.
And on the other hand, from the experience of the accompaniments we realized that on many occasions when the volunteers gave us feedback on how it had gone, they felt a lot of frustration and anger since they had witnessed, first hand, the violence institutional when they accompanied the women to these places. For this reason, a year ago, we decided to promote the Observatory of Masculinist Institutional Violence (OVIM).
We had two things very clear: that we could not do it alone, given the large scale of the project, and that it had to respond to grassroots feminist movements that exist in Spain, and that were already working a lot on the issue of institutional violence. We contacted the Almena Feminista Cooperative, which is now our partner in this project, as Almena has a proven track record in building participatory processes.
What returns did the volunteers give you?
For example, “we went to the trial and they didn’t let me enter the courtroom with the woman, when I was going to testify. The woman had a 13-day-old baby and left the room crying. And both the interpreter and the lawyer told her that it had gone very wrong, since the judge had told her why she hadn’t gone to give birth in her country, and on top of that she didn’t let her breastfeed the baby when she left to cry of hunger”. And you are supposed to be in the courts specializing in gender violence!
Another recent case, “I accompanied a woman and when we said goodbye to the lawyer, he told her: good luck. If they beat you up again in two years, don’t worry, I’ll be here to defend you.”
“I took the woman to the doctor and he didn’t even look her in the face. She didn’t treat her well, she was talking to me all the time, and I tried to tell her that she was the patient, not me.”
Or by going through an administrative procedure to be told “how have you been here for a year and you still don’t know the language?” This kind of thing comes to us constantly in voluntary returns. It is a constant for these women to suffer this type of sexist and racist violence.
How is OVIM being built?
Last year we started to lay the first foundation, very much at the level of how we imagine it and who would be part of it. Together with Almena Feminista we have constituted the figure of the assembly where organizations from all over Spain are participating, and there are more than 20 people counting the various feminist organizations and the specialized advisers. Then there is a smaller group, of 10 entities, which are the ones who are specifying the topics: objectives, mission, vision, strategic lines…
In the next meeting we will talk about how the denunciations, the complaints, the indicators will be made. And in the third, how will the strategy of political influence work. The idea is to present it publicly in March next year.
