Life in the slums of Vallcarca: "Who will give me a job or rent me a flat? Nobody"

BarcelonaFrom the outside it looks like a mountain of wood, fabric and scrap metal. But once inside, the prevailing organisation reveals a small community of neighbours, more or less an avenue. Life in the Vallcarca shanty town "is hard". This is admitted by Florina Drosu, who has lived there for years and has opened the doors of the site to receive a team from the ARA and explain how they are organised and how she and the rest of the neighbours live.

In the centre, a small square: the only area free of junk. To the right, a row of a dozen shacks makes its way to the back of the site. To the left, there are eight more mini-plots, these in the open air, separated by doors or iron elements, which serve as work stations for the scrap metal business. "There are eight groups working here, about twenty people in total. They accumulate scrap metal, each in their own place, and when they have enough to fill a truck, which is every three or four weeks, they sell it," explains Florina. "In a good month you can get 300 euros, but generally it doesn't go beyond 200," she adds. The settlement is both a roof and a place of work, explains the matriarch.

She sets up chairs for everyone in the middle of the square and invites us to chat. She says that she is 42 years old and that she was born in Bucharest. She says with her head held high that she is a Romanian gypsy. She married young – "as was done before," she says – and had three children. After serious episodes of abuse by her ex-partner, she fled her country in her early twenties to save her life. It took her a few years to be able to take her children with her. Now she has been living in the Vallcarca neighbourhood with her family for 20 years. At first she rented, in some flats that the City Council ended up demolishing; then on the vacant lot that remained. "The blog was built right here where I lived," she recalls. "Now I live alone in the shack. My children and grandchildren are in shared apartments," she explains. The neighbourhood movements and the housing union admit that they have relocated many of these families to empty and occupied apartments to prevent the parents from losing custody of their children. "I understand that they take your child if you mistreat him, but not because you are poor," Florina reflects.

There is very little official data in Catalonia on how many people are living in overcrowded settlements like Vallcarca. According to Barcelona City Council, there are almost 300 people living in camps like this one in the city, but social organisations say that the figure is far from being large. In Vallcarca alone, around seventy people are living in poverty. "Now we are mainly Romanian gypsies and some Moroccans, but everything has happened there, even a group of Catalan women for a while," Florina recalls. Now they believe that the days of the shacks are numbered. During the months of January and February, the municipal government of Jaume Collboni tried to carry out a technical inspection, but the neighbours prevented the officials from entering. "I am 100% sure that they wanted to find anything to say that there was an imminent danger and evict us," says Florina.

The City Council maintains that "an imminent eviction is not planned" in this area –where a defined position has been in place for years transformation of the neighborhood with new blogs and parks–. However, just a few days ago the abstention of the PSC allowed the PP to push through a proposal to evict the area “without further delay”. “They will look for any excuse, but I don’t see any danger. Have you looked carefully at my shack? If it falls on me I won’t die, I will simply move the wood and walk out”, jokes Florina, who since she found out that an inspection is due has even gotten rid of the small butane stove she had. “I’ve been eating cold things for a month”, she explains.

The shacks have precarious electricity and they get their water from the fountain. “I don’t want to live like this either, that’s why I’m asking for a way out. At least, if it can’t be a social rental, they should tell me where else I can build a shack, because without a roof, on the street, I would feel very unsafe”, she says. Florina also demands that she be allowed to work: "I want to work, but there is no way; there is a lot of discrimination for being a gypsy and having little education. How do they expect me to become a normal person who pays rent if I can't get any work?" She says that she has had "a lot of interviews", but the systematic rejection has ended up causing her depression. "I wouldn't mind working twelve hours a day if the salary allowed me to pay rent and have a decent life," she insists.

"But who will give me a job?" Who will rent me an apartment?? I assure you, no one. People have a lot of prejudices – he says, more and more excitedly – That's why we asked for a rental from the City Hall, because it's almost impossible to rent a private one. The other day we went to the City Hall to file an application. –he continues– and when the woman at reception saw us she started shouting "It's not me, it's not me!" I didn't understand anything," he says. With the passage of time he accepts that reaction as another example of racism: "It has always happened to us, it is the history of the gypsies."

In fact, there are quite a few racist graffiti spread around the neighbourhood, around the shacks. Florina is well aware that there is a part of the neighbourhood that accuses them of being troublemakers and dirty and wants them out. "First of all, I invite them to go to the police station and report the complaints against the gypsies," she says. "Secondly, I invite them to come and spend a day in the shacks, to see if they have the strength to endure it."

Florina tries hard to dismantle the stereotype that "gypsies like to live like this." "If we live like this it is because we are excluded from the world of work and from access to housing. If you want, we can do a test: let's go now together to look for a flat for me. Even if you spoke up, even if you offered them twice what they are asking... they wouldn't rent it to me," she says, convinced.

What if they end up dismantling the settlement? "Well, we're going to lose our homes and our jobs and we'll have to go somewhere else and start over," he replies. "But in my case it won't be too far away. Vallcarca is my neighbourhood; it's also my home," he concludes.