By Clara Esparza. The foreground photographs are by Elena Aguirre Molina.
Victòria Muñoz Moya was born in Terrassa, co-founder of the AfroFem Koop cooperative, member of the Black-African and Afro-descendant Community in Catalonia and student of the double degree in Political Sciences and Law. A half-breed woman, Afro-Catalan, has dedicated and dedicates her political activity, training and work to the anti-racist struggle and for the rights of all black-African and Afro-descendant femininities.
You are the daughter of a Cuban father and a Catalan mother. What role has your status as a mestizo woman played in your life and therefore in your activism?
On the issue of miscegenation, personally, when people have doubts and ask me “where are you from?” very insistently (because it seems that when I say I’m from Terrassa I don’t fully convince) I usually say that my father is Cuban and my mother is Catalan, since it seems that this already convinces the person who is questioning me · But, certainly, here is a first fallacy about the issue of miscegenation and how it challenges me, because there are many white Cubans (in fact, in the last census I consulted it said that the 60 % of Cubans are considered white) and there are many blacks who are Catalan, so perfectly my father could be white and my mother could not be. In my case, the stereotype that people have in their heads is fulfilled, and therefore this already generates a perfect image of why “this girl has this hair, this skin color and talks about these issues, because her father is Cuban “.
The role that the fact that my father is a black migrant has played in my activism is obvious, first of all, the fact that I was born into a house with a black, Cuban and migrant father has exposed the personal and family growth of Afro-descendant consciousness within the diaspora. On the other hand, a fundamental role that has played in my life and in my activism is the fact of becoming aware of the specific violence that people of Afro-descendant suffer in the Spanish state, because basically it is something that I have lived, that I have discussed and talked about at home and that it has largely played a fundamental role in my growth, both in childhood and adolescence.
My condition as a mestizo woman is a condition that is not born, but is socially imposed, because the process of racialization is not a process inherent in the birth of any person, but is a social process. As a person with certain physical features and cultural background, society has deposited in me a series of often violent and negative characteristics and this has forged my anti-racist and Afro-feminist political struggle.
As a woman of African descent from the Caribbean diaspora, do you think that the identity question has been one of the most important pillars in your activism?
The search for identity is a path that, for me, has 3 legs: On the one hand, the role played by the family environment, that is to say how, from home, I was brought up in this awareness politics of Afro-consciousness. Based on the model learned at home, there is an individual process of personal awareness of the specific violences that being an Afro-descendant woman of the Caribbean diaspora, also with specific attributes, entails, especially when you are the daughter of a Cuban and you are assumed to be Cuban and not Catalan.
The other very important leg is the collective leg, because this personal process of becoming aware of the struggles of the black-African and Afro-descendant peoples throughout the diaspora would not have made any sense if it had not been for the ‘accompanying the political spaces I inhabit and, therefore, this complexity that comes from being a black-African and Afro-descendant person and often alienated in this part of the world, which is Catalonia and, in general, in the State spanish All this has played an important role because it is a rather peculiar identity. It is an identity of past struggles that have preceded us, of migrant people who have arrived and who have opened very important paths for us and that we take over their struggles as we humbly consider and can.
On the other hand, on the side of Catalan society, there is often specific violence when you are considered to be a foreign person simply because you are not white. In other words, there is always a characterization of the Catalan and the Spanish as a white person, thus denying the historical past of this country, where we have had Muslim people, Jews from all over the world, where it has been colonized and therefore these people were also born within the framework of the Spanish State.
There is also a specific violence, as an Afro-Catalan woman, which is the fact that the Spanish State, and Catalonia in particular, have never repaired the crimes and genocidal atrocities of the colonial process. Often, in addition, there is a whole folklorization and colonial nostalgia that still manifests itself within the culture and popular festivals known throughout the territory, which become a cultural meeting point for Catalans but which at the same time involve a specific violence for the non-white Catalans, since we know that these holidays want to remember precisely the violence suffered by our ancestors or, many times, our direct relatives.
Then, to all this colonial nostalgia is added the fact that Afro-Catalan people also have difficulties in accessing work opportunities, housing and often shared problems related to economic insecurity. While it is true that not all of us bear the burden of the Aliens Act, which is one of the most violent manifestations of the Spanish State, we do bear the burden of being characterized and of not fulfilling this characterization of image that represents what “Catalan” is.
You have a strong political commitment to pan-Africanism. Could you tell us a little more about this movement?
Pan-Africanism is not only an articulation of a specific social or organizational nature but is in itself an ethical, philosophical and political corpus that comes to be the strategic and political alliance of African peoples around the world, also of those who were transferred from the African continent to other contexts such as America for the purposes of the slave trade. It is basically the political and strategic brotherhood of Africans wherever they are. It also seeks the liberation of African peoples, wherever they are, from any colonial, economic, political force that oppresses them as people who are part of the African diaspora.
For me, Pan-Africanism also makes a lot of sense in the framework of Afro-feminist struggles, where strategic alliances are generated from all over the world, of all Black-African and Afro-descendant women and femininities to fight against the patriarchal system, which is also closely related to the racist and capitalist system and international politics.
You are part of the Black-African and Afro-descendant Community in Catalonia (CNAACAT). Why is it important to carry out advocacy and dissemination actions as a way of eradicating racism in society?
We as an organization are not a cultural association but a political organization and we are governed by the black political subject. Therefore, our task is not to disseminate racism or pedagogy of any kind, but to carry out political advocacy actions, to highlight the specific violence suffered by our community and, above all, the passivity of the political class, of the Catalan territory and from a large part of the left, where racism is always a secondary problem.
Advocacy is important basically because our problems do not concern the political class or the institutions and, often, those who should protect us the most are those who exercise the most violence, not only on the part of the right and the extreme right but also by a large part of the social democracy of the white left of this territory. It is us as a political subject who articulate a common anti-racist agenda and from here we try to get it to the spaces we think are necessary.
You are co-founder of the cooperative AfroFem Koop. How did this initiative come about and what actions are you currently carrying out?
This initiative was born as a result of the reunion of five women who previously shared another space in Barcelona, before Covid, who identify a series of common problems shared by black-African and Afro-descendant women and femininities in our political network and affective An endemic problem which, in short, is the perennial economic and labor precariousness of black-African and Afro-descendant women and femininities.
AfroFem Koop has a whole line of services in anti-racist pedagogy that, despite the fact that this is not the ultimate goal of our cooperative, it is true that this activity allows us to sustain all the other activities that we carry out internally and externally, promoting the projects that integrate the entire network of AfroFem Koop partners, whose objectives are the integral development of Black-African and Afro-descendant women and femininities and this implies promoting their projects.
We are part of the AfroFem network, which is the Spanish Afro-feminist network. From here, the activities that we carry out in a network with other activist groups and Afro-feminist spaces in the Spanish State mainly have to do with activities of political influence, commenting on what are the needs that we find at the level of community as black-African and Afro-descendant women and femininities and, from there, articulating strategies for dissemination and public and political advocacy.
In addition, within our website we have the AFK Views section, where we publish articles of political impact and Afro-centric culture.
Photo: Salah Haddad Belfikh
As a student of political science and law and an Afro-feminist and anti-racist activist, how do you value the issue of whiteness in political and decision-making spaces?
Whiteness is not a trait exclusively inherent to all white people but is a way of facing the world, of perceiving it and of accepting the current paradigm. It is a positioning of power, hierarchy and acceptance of philosophical and structural paradigms to which political anti-racism, Afro-feminism and also pan-Africanism come to amend.
For a long time, Black African and Afro-descendant communities around the world, especially in Western countries, have fought very hard for representation, but what we meant by representation has often been misunderstood. When we talk about the need to have representation in spaces of power, we are not talking about a color quota, we are talking about representation not as an end in itself, but as a way to include all worldviews and the whole agenda as community and as a political subject. So, the fact that there are non-white people in the political and decision-making spaces does not in any way guarantee the inclusion of our worldviews or in any case the application of an anti-racist agenda.
In this sense, whiteness takes over on many occasions the historical struggles that have been promoted from communities such as black-African and Afro-descendant and, by extension, from many racialized communities, precisely using racialized people in the spaces of power, on electoral lists and within public administrations, to justify that their institutional action is not racist. In short, they use our struggles and misappropriate even terms.
Often, from white feminisms there is a conception that gender comes first and in any case the rest comes later. We have many examples of the misuse of representation and the concept of “intersectionality” in the spaces of white feminism and in the institutional spaces that supposedly fight for equality.
