"We grew up with disenchantment and anger": What's behind the Salt riots?

LeapSalt is the municipality with the lowest per capita income in Catalonia, and also one of the towns with the highest concentration of migrant population: nearly 40% of the residents are of foreign nationality. On Monday and Tuesday of this week, following the eviction of the family of Senegalese imam Kalilu Diawara, the migrant community of Salt took to the streets to demonstrate, and there were altercations and clashes with the policeBut the eviction of the spiritual leader from the mosque, coinciding with the month of Ramadan, has triggered an increasingly widespread discontent among the municipality's African-descended population; especially among young people born in Catalonia, fully Catalan, but who have long felt mistreated and discriminated against by institutions, and lacking the same opportunities as native families.

This Saturday, some twenty of these associations, under the auspices of the Housing Union, called for a new joint demonstration for the right to housing, in which some 400 people participated. At ARA, we spoke with four Catalans of migrant origin, of different ages and backgrounds, all of whom were present at the demonstrations and who know and experience the reality of the municipality firsthand. We also spoke with Aliou Diallo, a Salta native and researcher at the University of Girona (UdG), an expert in institutional racism. This is their diagnosis.

Mortgages granted with ease

To explain the current situation in Salt, we must go back to the bursting of the real estate bubble in 2008, since many of the evicted families, like the imam's, had accessed their homes with a mortgage, according to Diallo. "These are people who arrived in the municipality around the year 2000, at a time of economic prosperity, in a context in which the most accessible option offered by banks to people with a one-year employment contract was to sign a mortgage with abusive conditions and inflated prices," he argues.

The foreign families who arrived in Salt—Diallo continues—with the expectation of accumulating enough assets to return to their country of origin in the medium term were kidnapped by that crisis and all those who have followed in the aftermath, generating a malaise that becomes even more traumatic when they see themselves expelled.

Diala Diarra, 49, has experienced this situation firsthand. "The banks should have taken into account that two €1,500 salaries and four or five children weren't enough to get a mortgage, especially if we have to send money to our families in Africa and visit them every year or two," she argues. She knows many cases like hers, as she works for a cultural organization that helps African women in the Girona region. "After 20 or 15 years of paying the mortgage, having a vulture fund come and kick you out means losing the money we've invested, our health, our dignity, and our human right to housing."

That's why Diarra understands why her children are angry. "We feel all day long that immigrants come to steal jobs and benefits, but we've been working hard for many years, paying into Social Security, and yet no one talks about the colonization, slavery, and plundering of European wealth in our lands," he says.

Institutional and police racism

Another reason that has heated up the atmosphere among migrant residents of Salt is institutional racism, directly linked to the housing problem, explains Diallo. In fact, the Salta Housing Union was born in 2021 as an explicitly anti-racist struggle, denouncing the discrimination by real estate agencies when selecting tenants and the City Council's obstacles to offering public housing to people without Spanish nationality or long-term residence permits.

"The City Council failed to take into account the demographic reality of Salta, populated by foreigners in precarious situations, and equalized the requirements for the entire population by reserving percentages of the housing stock for different groups, effectively making it easier for a student who lives in Salta only during the academic year to access them."

This is Tarek Cheriha, 29, who was born in Morocco but grew up in Salt. He is highly critical of the innate racism in society: "We have never shaken off the stigma that we are immigrants. We are always linked to crime, and now that we are experiencing a wave of reaction, it only fuels this situation," he argues. In his opinion, the government's response to this situation has been repression, installing cameras on every corner of the most segregated neighborhoods, and with a clear increase in indiscriminate stop-and-go inspections.

For this reason, he himself has come out to demonstrate this week, convinced that young people are increasingly aware and politicized. "We have grown up with disenchantment, anger, but I have hope: I see the new generations very involved in fighting for our rights, protecting the neighborhood's residents against real estate speculation and the far right," Cheriha concludes.

Weekly evictions with minors

In Salt, a town of 34,000, more than one eviction occurs every week, often involving families with minors. Like Saliha and Hawa Jallow, mothers who lost their homes in the first quarter of this year and still have no solution and are coping as best they can. This situation directly affects their children, who attend the municipality's primary and secondary schools. There, teachers must constantly deal with these students, whose educational progress is interrupted by eviction.

In fact, many teachers actively participate in protests to stop evictions, to the point that they have formed the Platform of Teachers for the Right to Housing, a pioneer in Catalonia. "We're talking about a municipality where there's practically no foreigner who doesn't know an evicted family, with the added consequences for the children—beyond having to bear the brunt of this violence—of not going to school or having to add more kilometers to their commutes," Ali laments.

Mònica Saguer is a social integration technician at the Salvador Espriu Institute and has faced numerous cases like these. "It's not an urgent situation, but an emergency: it's very severe. We have students sleeping in a restaurant's dining room or taking the train at six in the morning because they're staying in another municipality," she explains. Regarding the angry reaction of some teenagers who have been present at the demonstrations, she concludes: "They're not immune to the evictions of their families and experience it as an injustice, with anger, shame, or silence. In this aggressive context, we face the great pedagogical challenge of defending peace and nonviolence."

Unequal treatment with the administration

Salt City Council's Social Services are responsible for processing and assisting the cases of all these families in vulnerable situations. However, many residents find it difficult to access services, not only because the services are overwhelmed, but also because they lack a command of the language or the administrative procedures. That's why Alhagie Nyabally, a father who has lived in Salt for 14 years, has trained in immigration laws and acts as a mediator between the migrant community and institutions to help process aid.

"The boys and girls who were born here have secondary school, intermediate or bachelor's degrees, but because of their skin color, they are still treated as foreigners, they do not have the same opportunities, and they end up working in the fields, in slaughterhouses or as cleaners, without being able to pay themselves. He is satisfied with the work of the Salt city council, but he believes that the administrations should open their doors to migrants so that they can work.

"How many black people and Arabs work in the City Council? If those who are supposed to solve the problems we have in Salt are all white, we will not do well; "We need people who understand our culture and treat us as equals," he questions. Emotional, and with tears in his eyes, Nyabally concludes: "It's not right for young people to throw eggs or stones at the police, but the police must also learn to treat them without thinking that they are bad, they must understand that they are like their children, brothers, and that they are the future."

Finally, Diallo also points out that, despite the socioeconomic conditions of the migrant population of Salt, despite the institutional racism they suffer every day and the high police presence in neighborhoods inhabited by groups without the right to vote, "social peace in Salt is based on two fundamental pillars." On the one hand, a social fabric that ties together different diasporas and generates axes of mutual aid with a more familial than neighborhood character. On the other hand, an associative network that makes up for structural institutional deficiencies.