Raciolinguistic micro-aggressions in the school stories of immigrant adolescents in Barcelona: a challenge to the notion of Spanish exceptionalism?

ABSTRACT

In recent years, a discourse of Spanish exceptionalism has arisen, whereby Spain has managed to integrate over five million immigrants in a very short period of time without the kind of social upheaval witnessed in other European countries over the past several decades. Overtly racist and xenophobic discourses have generally been, with notable exceptions, absent in the public domain. However, under the radar, visible minorities frequently suffer ‘racial micro-aggressions’, that is, racially-loaded verbal and other behaviours that are seemingly innocuous but are uptaken as offensive and insulting by the micro-aggressed. More specifically, these racial micro-aggressions are often raciolinguistic in nature, that is, they reflect the confluence of language and race in the unequal positioning of individuals in interactions. In this article, we focus on how young people from immigrant backgrounds tell ‘school stories’, embedded in normative Catalan/Spanish bilingualism in Catalonia, which are raciolinguistic in nature and relate to racial micro-aggressions experienced by tellers. We do this with a view to showing how all is not as well in Spain as many might think as regards the integration of immigrants, and that greater attention to racism is in order.

KEYWORDS:

• Spanish exceptionalism
• raciolinguistics
• racial micro aggressions
• school stories
• immigration
• Catalan Spanish bilingualism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Victor Corona is Adjunct Professor and researcher at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra (Spain) in the Grup de Recerca en Ensenyament i Interacció Plurilingües. He has published articles on language and identity of Latino Youth in Barcelona, Latino Hip Hop and language varieties, and ethnographical methodology applied in educational research.

David Block is ICREA Research Professor in Sociolinguistics in the Departament d'Humanitats at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Spain). He has published on a variety of language-related topics, which he examines drawing on scholarship in Marxist political economy, sociology and anthropology. His three most recent books are Social class in applied linguistics (2014), Political Economy and Sociolinguistics: Neoliberalism, Inequality and Social Class (2018) and Post-truth and political discourse (2019). He is currently writing a book entitled Innovations and challenges in identity research.

Notes

1 This state of affairs changed abruptly in elections held in December 2018, April 2019, May 2019 and November 2019, when Vox, in essence the seceded ultra-right wing of the Spanish conservative party (the Partido Popular), gained representation in a range of autonomous communities, municipal governments, and most importantly, the Spanish parliament (the Congreso de Diputados). In the latter it now holds 52 seats, thus making it the third largest party.

2 As Catalans (albeit Catalans via immigration in early adulthood!), we are all too aware of the myriad differences one might cite to distinguish Catalonia from the rest of Spain. However, based on what we know about the experiences of immigrants in a range of contexts around Spain, we do not see appreciable differences between how immigrants are treated in Catalonia and how they are treated in the rest of Spain. Nevertheless, the existence of Catalan/Spanish bilingualism in Catalonia does present a factor that makes racial dynamics all the more complex in Catalonia.

3 See Walter Mignolo (2005) for an interesting discussion of the Spanish colonial period in Latin America and its current effects.

4 This was a project begun by Lídia Gallego Balsà and David Block, which later incorporated Víctor Corona and Kamran Khan.

5 All informant names provided in this paper are pseudonyms.

6 It should be noted that switching from Catalan to Spanish in the presence of people deemed to be outsiders has a long history (see Aracil 1983).