Sun, 22 November 2009
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"Imagine there's no countries ... And the world will live as one." The late John Lennon's dream in the song Imagine is far from having become reality, but it is constantly being tested out in Europe's multicultural immigrant neighbourhoods.Spain's most important testing ground for the coexistence of people from all over the world is Lavapies in the heart of Madrid.
Once the city's Jewish quarter and later known for its elderly population, Lavapies is now home to some 50,000 people from more than 80 countries who have created their own brand of the global village.
Its traditional Spanish pastel-coloured buildings with iron balconies house Indian and Pakistani food stores, Asian and Arab restaurants, Chinese and Senegalese clothes shops, Muslim butcher's shops, basement mosques and African hairdressing salons.
Lavapies is also known as a haunt of artists with an unrestrained night life and a relatively high rate of petty crime.
Elderly Spanish residents who have seen the neighbourhood change radically sit on benches in the central square and watch people from all over the world pass by.
The cavalcade includes Latin American women pushing prams, West Africans in their colourful robes, Spanish punks and squatters, a Sudanese poet well known in the local bars, secret police looking for Islamist terrorists...
"I regard myself as an adopted son of Lavapies," said flamenco dancer Joaquin Cortes, one of the artists and intellectuals who like the neighbourhood for its unconventional atmosphere and active cultural life.
Residents like Vicente Bachero still remember the quiet and thoroughly Spanish Lavapies of the 1980s, when "people came to stand on their doorsteps to take fresh air in the evenings."
Now, however, "with a few exceptions like the pharmacy or the stationer's, every shop is owned by a foreigner," Bachero observes.
Lavapies acts as a magnet for Africans crossing over to Spain on rickety boats, as well as for other immigrants in a country where the number of foreign residents has soared to nearly 10 percent of the 45-million population.
Nearly 20 percent of babies born in Spain had at least one foreign parent in 2007, up from 4.5 percent in 1996.
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