Ceuta: the youth and the border

With my Spanish passport I can go to Morocco whenever I want. I take a plane, I land in Marrakech, in Tangier, in Casablanca, in Essaouira or in the desert, I enter, I leave and I return home without thinking too much about it. Like so many other Europeans, I enjoy the charme of Morocco, its light, its gastronomy, the sensuality of its streets, the kindness of its people. I take photographs, I buy spices, books or carpets and, when the holidays are over, I return to Barcelona.

I am not objective. Morocco is also my country, and whenever I can, I return. This year I have already traveled there four times and in October I will return to celebrate my friend Quim's sixtieth birthday. Fourteen of us will go. We will have dinner in a restaurant where, after the meal, a band plays live music and everyone ends up dancing until late into the night. In just three days we will experience that mix of beauty, chaos, hospitality and joy that makes that country so special.

I confess something else. One of the things that makes me happiest is bringing friends there. I love to see how they fall in love with the country, how they discover its people, how they return with the feeling of having experienced something more intense than a simple vacation.

But every time I go, I also do something else: I observe the young people.

I observe them in cafes, in the streets, in hotels, driving taxis, working in restaurants or studying. Some come from wealthy families; others, from very humble neighborhoods. All, or almost all, share the same look towards the future. They dream. And many of them dream of exactly what I do without giving it importance: being able to go and come back. Being able to see the world. Being able to decide where to live, where to study or simply where to spend a weekend.

When we in Europe talk about migration, we almost always talk about poverty, wars, hunger or makeshift boats. And all of this exists. But there is another reality that we talk about very little: the daily frustration of knowing that the world is open to others and closed to you.

Imagine being a twenty-year-old in Casablanca, Nador, or Tangier. Seeing tourists enter and leave your country every day with absolute normality while you need impossible visas, justifications, money, invitations, and often, you end up receiving a "no." Imagine growing up in front of a border that reminds you, day after day, that some people are born with the right to move freely and others have to ask for permission to breathe a little further.

If I were one of those young people, I sincerely believe I would be obsessed with the border. Not because I hated my country, but because I would want to exercise a freedom I saw every day in others. The border would end up occupying a space within me. Crossing it would cease to be just a physical act to become an existential necessity.

I have crossed the borders of Ceuta and Melilla many times. I crossed them before I had a Spanish passport, and I have continued to cross them since. The two experiences have nothing to do with each other.

Before, I used to queue for hours, surrounded by people resignedly waiting behind fences and controls. I perfectly remember the sensation of moving forward slowly, as if we were a herd, while I watched other people cross almost without stopping, protected by their European passports.

Then I got the Spanish passport. Suddenly, the same border became a simple formality. The queue was no longer for me. The gates opened. No one looked at me with suspicion. I had changed very little. What had changed was the color of my passport.

That's why, when I hear about borders from the comfort of Europe, I try to remember that feeling. Borders not only delineate states; they also distribute privileges. And there are few privileges as invisible as being able to open a passport without realizing that millions of people would give anything to have exactly the same gesture.