Why are the children of immigration not at the theatre?
There is a test that can be done any evening of theater, concert, or dance festival in Catalonia: look at the audience. In many cases, almost all faces are of native people, from a recognizable middle class, even when they are children's shows. Then, we go out into the street, take the subway, and return to the plural reality of a country in which, in Barcelona or Girona, between 20% and 25% of the population has migratory origins. The question is inevitable: where have they stayed?
For years, the easy answer was to wait. The immigrant population — we said — had other priorities: papers, work, housing, school for the children. Culture was a second-rate luxury. It was an understandable and, in part, true explanation. But twenty, twenty-five years have passed. Those sons and daughters of immigration from the nineties and the two thousands are now adults, many of them born here or raised here from childhood, with more or less qualified studies and jobs. And yet, they continue to be absent from the cultural spaces of their own city or town. The explanation of "they will come when they are settled" no longer works. We need to look at where the real problem lies.
A report by the Migration Policy Institute Europe (2022), based on interviews with cultural professionals from eleven European countries, states it clearly: the diversity that characterizes European cities is not reflected in museums, theaters, or concert halls. But the most important thing it points out is where the blockage lies: not in the indifference of the immigrant public, but in the very structures of cultural institutions, which continue to think, program, and communicate for an implicit audience that is native, middle-class, and culturally hegemonic.
Academic research on structural racism in Europe confirms it: racism operates in culture not as a sum of individual acts of hatred, but as a structural logic that manifests itself in the selection of content, in the circuits of legitimacy, in the territorial distribution of resources, and in the definition of who is a "cultural subject" and who is merely tolerated or, in the best case, exoticized. When immigration appears in programming, it usually does so under the label of "world music" or "intercultural week," with what that implies: you are not part of the canon, you are a seasonal guest.
Barriers are often invisible. There are economic ones: a theatre ticket costing 25 or 30 euros is not an insurmountable obstacle, but it is a class filter that operates on those who mentally exclude themselves before buying it. There are territorial ones. There are symbolic ones, the most important: the deep feeling of not being welcome, of not finding “your world” reflected on stage, of perceiving implicit codes — in communication, in institutional image, in the very atmosphere — that convey that this space was not designed for you.
A study on visible minority artists in Norway (The art of navigating a white upper-class gaze: exploring visible minorities’ negotiations of belonging in the norwegian cultural field 2025) shows that even those who manage to enter the professional cultural world must constantly navigate a "native and class gaze" that defines who is legitimate and who must justify their presence. If this is the case even for creators, imagine what the general public experiences when considering whether or not to buy a ticket.
There is a self-reinforcing cycle: institutions do not represent diversity, people of immigrant backgrounds do not see themselves reflected, they do not go, institutions conclude that "they are not interested in culture" and do not change anything. In this way, the fact that there are almost no people of immigrant backgrounds in the seats goes from being a sign of structural exclusion to being read as proof of the supposed cultural indifference of groups that, paradoxically, often maintain very rich artistic traditions that are completely invisible to official circuits.
The solution is not to organize more "diversity nights." The solution is to reform who programs, who finances, who decides, from what imaginary of community the cultural policy of a city or town is built. It implies accepting that the lack of representation is not neutral – it is political –. That culture is not an innocent space where everyone can enter if they want, but a territory where power distributes recognition and legitimizes who symbolically exists in collective life.
Until cultural institutions truly ask themselves — for whom do I do this? Who is not here and for what reason? — we will continue to read absence as indifference, when in reality it is a silent expulsion, as has also been happening for decades with the Roma people in cultural spaces.
