By Sonia Potoy and J. Palomés.
Marianela Peña is Cuban, writer and cultural promoter of FEDELATINA, the organization that includes nearly fifty Latin American associations from various fields, whose objective is to provide assistance, services, legal advice and coordination to migrants and returnees. A space of meeting and cohesion for those who left Latin America in search of a new future.
How did you get to Barcelona?
I am Cuban and I came to Barcelona for family matters. My two daughters immigrated here and one of them had a son and I came to help her. My daughter arrived with the title of journalist from Cuba and her wish was to integrate into the social and cultural life here, but it was not easy… So when I arrived I dedicated myself to household chores, helping to my daughters so that they could have more opportunities.
And that would involve a series of personal sacrifices on your part…
Of course. Renunciations are the first thing we assume when we decide to leave our lands in search of a better future. I was teaching at the University of the Orient in Santiago de Cuba, so I gave up on a number of challenges I had set myself, such as the doctorate I was already working on. I arrived here, therefore, with the aim of taking care of my grandson and my daughters and with many questions about my future. Although in Cuba I had already started to take an interest in and investigate the links my country had with Catalonia.
And what conclusions did you come to?
Well, these researches that I started in Cuba have become a project that I am still working on, because I expanded the field of study to Latin America. When my daughters decided to come to Catalonia, I became interested in the links that Cuba had with Catalonia. In other words, the footprints that the Catalans had left in Cuba. I started researching and studying the archives. I established contact with all the Catalan houses in Cuba, mainly the House in Havana and the one in Santiago de Cuba. When I arrived in Vilanova i la Geltrú I dedicated myself to domestic life, helping my daughters, and established contact with a Cuban organization, Associació Camilo Cienfuegos, but I also resumed researching Catalan relations in Cuba, and not only in Cuba because I extended them to Latin America, thanks to a grant from the Caixa.
It is inevitable to refer to the black trade when we talk about the Catalan influence in Cuba, isn’t it?
Of course. Almost everything is talked about the black slave trade. There is a lot of research on this topic. The Güell family, the Baró family, the Marquis of Comillas, among others, made colossal fortunes from trafficking and the inhumane exploitation of the cane plantations. But my research focuses particularly on the positive footprint of the Catalans who were there, who were not all slavers or exploiters, of course. There is a wide list of experiences in the field of pedagogy, medicine, science, art, culture, knowledge, in many areas in which Catalans stood out in Latin America, which sometimes they are not well known. Margarita Xirgu, for example, is an icon in Argentina and Uruguay. In Cuba, the surnames Partagás, Bacardí, Gelats or Llagostera are part of the history of my country; José Martí, the father of Cuban independence, had Valencian origins; at the beginning of the 20th century, the main printing houses in my country were owned by Catalan publishers. And so many examples.
You mentioned to me before the fundamental role of women in this influence…
We have been expanding this project year after year. Thus, in 2023 we have focused the study on the Catalan woman who arrives in Latin America. It should be clarified that there are two major contemporary migratory waves of Catalans in Latin America: the first occurred in the 19th century, and the other occurred as a result of the Civil War and the Franco regime. In the first we could say that the woman “accompanyed”, however, in the second we find that the woman has an independent and prominent role in the various fields of culture and science in the Latin American countries where she is established.
What activities do you carry out at FEDELATINA as a cultural activist?
In FEDELATINA there are 47 associations from various fields and from practically all Latin American countries. It is a refuge in an atmosphere of cohesion. In addition, the gender vision is transversal in all the projects we tackle at FEDELATINA. I highlight a project that, in my opinion, is very important: the Women’s Space. Two days a week – Monday and Wednesday – we attend to women with various problems and advise these women legally, psychologically and at work. Over the course of the past year, we organized five workshops on migrant Latin American women. Each of these workshops starts from the existential experience of a migrant woman that she tells us herself – and that sometimes this experience has been embodied in a book – and that is assumed by the group that attends the workshop, because they are usually similar or at least very understandable experiences.
How are the dynamics of these workshops?
These workshops are interesting because based on the personal experiences of the women participants, dynamics are established, the aim of which is to find practical ways to face this problem. Sometimes, we look for the complicity of other institutions and direct them to where they can find solutions: to certain departments of the Generalitat or the City Council, to Càritas, to SOS Racisme, to Tot Raval… to the many specialized entities in Barcelona . It’s about strengthening the inner self, empowering these women who arrive with too much misinformation and shortcomings, and making them see that dreams can be achieved, that they are far from impossible.
What is the first hurdle these migrant women face when they get here?
Obviously, the first problem faced by the migrant woman who arrives at our workshops is the struggle for subsistence, not having a means of living. Most of the women in our workshops have had to go through domestic work, renouncing the training they brought from their country, since some of them, indeed, come with a solid training. For many migrant women, the first major disappointment is having to give up their training and having to resort to the precarious jobs that are the only ones they have access to. And a particularly worrying sector is that of internal women where precariousness is the norm. And not only that: we find that, on some occasions, migrant women are subjected to abuse and discrimination. In one of the workshops we discuss the case of a Salvadoran lawyer who had to flee her country and who is interned in a house in very precarious conditions. In fact, perverse stereotypes that favor discrimination prevail in this sector: employers establish “favored” nationalities -Ecuadorian, Honduran and Filipino, fundamentally- in order to prioritize certain occupations.
In FEDELATINA, how do you approach the distance, the nostalgia of the migrant woman?
Uprooting is a constant in the phenomenon of emigration. There are very few migrant women who forget their roots no matter how many years they stay in another country. They travel with their homeland in their suitcases. Even when they form a family, the child, even if he is Catalan because he was born here, will be educated in the traditions, in the gastronomy, in the values, in the songs, the customs and the folklore of the country they left behind . These women settled here build a new life but without renouncing the identity of their country of origin, in such a way that at FEDELATINA we speak of multiple identities, the one they assume here as their own and that of their country of origin in which they do not give up.
I have written a book called No me des más arroz que yo soy Catalan. The title responds to a phrase that my nephew once said to me as a way of rejecting his Cuban origin. The book is aimed at the young children of migrants and I explain to them what we call pluriidentity. Even if they are born, raised and educated here, they must not do without an identity that ties them to their roots, because this enriches them.
You told me that in the cultural field at FEDELATINA you promote poetry workshops…
Indeed, we organize poetry workshops. And the participants have come to identify as a collective with the common characteristic of migration, which is what unites them. His poems talk about the life of the emigrant because everyone suffers from this circumstance. They talk about the vicissitudes of this life, the nostalgia, the longings, the loneliness, the job insecurity and the pretension to combine and unify the two cultures with which they live: that of their origins and that of society in which they have integrated. And, of course, love and heartbreak. I have precisely compiled an anthology of Latin American poets based in Barcelona. He wanted his poetry to stand out.
