Why is this one coming, now?
Looking back at my own family history and intergenerational experiences of migration. Originally published in Varsity, 21/10/2020.
Urban centre of Montevideo, Uruguay. Photo by Chris Slupski on Unsplash
“Many a time I feel banished and wanting to go back
to that exile that banishes me
and then it seems I don’t belong
to no place, to no one.
Might it be a hint that never again
will I be anything but an exile?
That here or there or everywhere
there will always be someone watching, thinking:
Why is this one coming, now?And yet I’m coming, perhaps to share weariness and vertigo,
abandonment, fondness
coming also to receive my share of grudges
my sensible allocated love.
In fact, why I’m coming,p
I don’t quite know for sure,
but I’m coming.”(Poem by Mario Benedetti, Uruguayan writer whose 100th birthday was celebrated September 2020. Translation own.)
It’s not easy, being an immigrant in the UK. Not when you’re the third consecutive generation of migrants in your family. And though my parents and grandparents’ migration was triggered by the need to exile while mine wasn’t, being an immigrant has certainly not got easier in 2020.
My maternal grandparents were Catalan. They had successful careers in Barcelona: he was an actor and she, a dressmaker. They fled the country in the 40s, when Franco came to power and established a dictatorship after the Spanish Civil War. Because of his status as a public figure, my grandfather had been put on lists of all kinds and been persecuted. The options for exile were Australia or Uruguay: in the end, the latter was where my mother was born.
Thirty years later, it was South America that had become the core of fascism. A network of dictatorships appeared, facilitated by Henry Kissinger and engineered to become another card in the United States’ Cold War strategy. When my mother, my aunt and my grandparents fled back to Catalonia, Franco was close to dying, but that didn’t stop them from encountering a general hostility, bred from the almost forty years of Spanish dictatorship. My mother was ten.
And then there is me: I migrated to the United Kingdom for purely privileged reasons such as looking for a better education and quality of life. Don’t you love it, having dual nationality?
———
The reason I’m telling you this is not because I need validation or because I want you to know how bad my family has had it. I’m telling these things because I’d like you to understand how difficult it is to negotiate the layers of ancestry and movement that run through my family. It’s hard to not understate your own hardships when those before you have gone through exiles and fascist regimes. The weight of ancestry hangs heavy on your shoulders: all of a sudden, even if no one has said it explicitly, you have to make them proud, make their suffering worth it. And your position is much better, this time around... so.
I came to this country to study performing arts, something which in Catalonia has become a mainly private or privately-managed institution, making it inaccessible and elitist to many. Even though I’d have to be in debt for years afterward, I thought an education here would be worth it, and I still believe that. If I made the hard decision to put my family in even more financial struggle in order to study an MPhil here at Cambridge, it was because (heartbreaking though it was) I have the hope to, in turn, financially support them in the future.
However, the xenophobia of UK migrant policy and the impact of Brexit quickly crushed my idealised version of this country. I imagined this could be a place where working in the Arts and Humanities would be easier, one where my ideas and skills would be appreciated, one where everyone was just so nice and besides, I will fit in better since I’m an introvert. I figured since I was European it would be easy to integrate. Needless to say, after three years of living here on my own, my opinions and feelings have become a tiny bit more nuanced. And I’m not sure I still want to cater to whatever the government thinks integrating means.
Though we could argue about where it is hardest to have a career in anything that’s not STEM- or business-related, I find myself thinking beyond these issues. I think that it is funny, in a way, that when my actor grandfather went into exile, he found a way to build on his acting career successfully, whereas I’ve already switched subjects twice (from Drama to English, from English to Classics). And yet, knowing myself to be not only more privileged than them but also privileged in many other ways fills me with guilt. Why is it so tough to be intersectional in our relationship with ourselves? This is not the oppression olympics: why can’t I recognise the oppressed facets of myself as well as the privileged ones?
I have no answers to any of this. I have no thesis, no structural question to my status as a migrant. I don’t know why I stay here, but it must be because I have some sort of hope. I guess I could talk more explicitly about my experience as an immigrant here. And sure, I could talk about those who made fun of my English for almost two years, under the pretext of being my friends. And I could talk about how even now, after three years of living and working here, the way I speak is still met with surprise because I am not the broken English speaker that the British think a foreigner should be. But nowadays, I try to be grateful instead. I think of all those who are pushing for change, of the friends and teachers and researchers and everybody that makes me feel like maybe staying here is worth it. In a reality where injustice is heralded by the government daily, you are hope, and you make the idea of a future here a promising one.
