The third vertex of the Latinx triangle: Latin America and the repopulation of rural Spain

Abstract

In the 1980s, a significant number of Latin Americans began moving to urban centers in the Iberian peninsula. These arrivals grew exponentially. By 2022, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Honduras, Paraguay, Peru, the Dominican Republic, and Venezuela each had more than 100,000 citizens in Spain. While cities have been the most visible poles of attraction for Latin American immigration, small towns have also witnessed the arrival of Latin Americans. Rural Spain, commonly known as “empty Spain,” had been shrinking and waning in silence for decades, due to an aging population and the migration of young adults to the cities. In 2021 Spain’s central government started to speak of migration as a solution for depopulation, but this proposal’s origins date further back. In 2000 the local government of Aguaviva, a small town in Teruel, decided to bring back life to “empty Spain” by inviting Argentinian families to settle there in exchange for employment and housing. Since then, many more towns have followed suit. The documentary Aguaviva: La vida en tres maletas (2004, “Aguaviva: Life in Three Suitcases”), directed by Verónica Marchiaro and Mario Burbano, offers the story of this first rural repopulation. A close look at the diverse lived experiences portrayed in the documentary, and its different points of views on hospitality, can help guide current conversations on repopulation.

Keywords

Spain Latin America immigration repopulation rural hospitality

Spain’s long relationship with Latin America took a critical change of course at the beginning of the 1980s, when significant numbers of Latin Americans began moving to the Iberian Peninsula, mainly to Madrid. In the following decades, large cities such as Barcelona, Seville, and Valencia also began to attract more and more immigrants. These arrivals grew exponentially, and by 2022, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Honduras, Paraguay, Peru, the Dominican Republic, and Venezuela each had more than 100,000 citizens in Spain, with Colombia (568,034), Venezuela (440,992), and Argentina (328,333) leading the way (Instituto Nacional de Estadística, INE, Población). Urban centers are the most visible poles of attraction for Latin American immigration. Today, for example, Madrid is known as the “Nueva Miami” (New Miami), and neighborhoods such as “Little Caracas,” the triángulo latino (Latin Triangle) (Reina, 2023) and “Pequeño Perú” (Little Peru) have appeared in Spain’s capital.

Yet small towns are also witnessing Latin Americans’ arrivals. Rural Spain is commonly known as “empty Spain,” a term coined by Sergio del Molino (2016) in his narrative essay Empty Spain, where he addresses the social and economic obstacles related to the unequal distribution of the country’s population. Rural Spain had been shrinking and waning in silence for decades, due to an aging population and the migration of young adults to urban areas. Three years later, on 31 March 2019, a large demonstration in Madrid drew attention to the new concept of “emptied Spain,” illustrating that the depopulation of rural areas is due to human action rather than to natural decline. Whether Spain is “empty” (evoking a particular moment in time) or “emptied” (suggesting a long-term process), the nation’s rural inhabitants have clearly experienced and identified this problem and have started to work to try to solve it. In this article, the term “empty Spain” is used to focus on responses to the actual phenomenon, instead of its causes.

In 2021 Spain’s central government started to imagine migration as a response to depopulation, with José Luis Escrivá, Spain’s Minister of Inclusion, Social Security, and Migrations, proposing measures that encouraged migrants to move to rural areas. This plan was presented as a new idea, but we need to go back over 20 years to see this policy’s origins. In 2000 the local government of Aguaviva, a small town in Teruel, decided to bring back life to “empty Spain” by inviting Argentinian families with children to settle in their town in exchange for a job and housing. Since then, many more towns all over Spain have followed suit, with examples such as “The Generalitat Pays a Salary and Finds Jobs for Foreigners to Live in Small Towns, but Bans Spaniards from Getting this Aid” (Planes, 2023); “València Proposes to Repopulate Towns with Immigrants Due to the Saturation of the City” (R.L.V. and EFE, 2019); or “Immigration Could Repopulate the Deserted Rural Areas of Asturias” (Arce, 2019). The documentary Aguaviva: La vida en tres maletas (2004, “Aguaviva: Life in Three Suitcases”), directed by Verónica Marchiaro and Mario Burbano, tells the story of this first rural llamada. Its protagonists’ voices capture the difficulty of transforming an “invisible” space, and the effects of this transformation on Spaniards’ and Latin Americans’ sense of belonging. The film provides an incisive look at the dynamics of “repopulation,” as well as the lived experience of the migrants who answered this call more than two decades ago.

It will be helpful to consider the magnitude of Aguaviva’s depopulation, and the efforts to bring life back to the town, within the broader context of Spanish birth rates and population growth. The twentieth century witnessed a great fluctuation in Spain’s birth rate. It began to decline around the First World War and continued to fall into the 1950s, dropping from 33.2 births per thousand inhabitants between 1906 and 1910 to 20.4 per thousand inhabitants in the early 1950s (Pérez Moreda, 27). Except for the 1960s, when births rose slightly (Pérez Moreda, 1984: 27), the birthrate kept dropping, and this trend has continued ever since. Concurrently, Spain has also seen a change in its population’s composition. With the end of the dictatorship, Spain went from being a country of net emigration to a country of immigrants. Immigration has grown exponentially since the 1980s, rising from 241,975 foreigners in 1985 (Sevilla Soler, 2005: 180) to 6,227,092 by 1 April 2023 (INE Estadística, 2), when the country’s population reached 48 million inhabitants for the first time. In the words of the National Institute of Statistics’ 2023 report: “The population growth of Spain was due to the increase in people of foreign nationality, which offset the reduction of those of Spanish nationality” (Instituto Nacional de Estadística, INE Estadística, 2).

Rural areas have suffered acutely from these population changes. At the beginning of the twentieth century, only a third of Spaniards lived in urban centers. By the 1950s, the number of urban inhabitants surpassed that of towns, and according to the Instituto Geográfico Nacional (National Geographic Institute), almost two thirds of Spaniards lived in cities by 1980. Although rural municipalities account for 82% of all municipalities and 84% of Spanish territory, in 2020 only 15.9% of the population was registered in rural municipalities (Instituto Geográfico Nacional, 1). Most of these villages are characterized by an aging and masculinized population, available jobs that are considered poorly paid by nationals (such as agriculture and construction), and a lack of health services and economic investment in infrastructure. All these factors have contributed to rural Spain’s progressive decline and an evident depopulation.

Spanish media have shown a marked interest in the phenomenon of a shrinking Spain. Since the publication of Sergio del Molino’s La España vacía (2016), depopulation has grabbed the headlines, most of them apocalyptic in tone. Newspaper headings include: “The Ghost of Depopulation Takes Out Its Anger on Interior Spain” (Pereda, 2019); “The Spain that Trembles if the Bar Shuts Down: ‘Without It, the Town is a Ghost’” (Sosa Troya, 2022); “Six Ghost Towns in Zamora to Make you Tremble” (Arias, 2021); and “From ‘Black Spain’ to ‘Empty Spain’” (De la Flor, 2016) among others. Articles abound in references to vanishing villages, forgotten places, and ghost towns in need of resuscitation. This spectral narrative of endangered spaces is usually accompanied by photographs of empty streets and roads seemingly leading to nowhere; when persons appear, they are always visibly elderly.

These “ghost town” news stories coexist with a complementary narrative of the saving presence of immigrants. Headlines such as “Immigrants to Save a Spain that Is Dying” (Delle Femmine, 2017); “Immigration Gives Life to Emptied Spain” (Marlasca, 2020); and “Oxygen from the Other Side of the Ocean to Revive Empty Towns” (Martín and Zamora, 2023) suggest the positive role immigrants can play. And indeed, since the 1990s, various public and private programs have sought to repopulate towns by attracting immigrants. The most popular public initiative is the so-called llamada (call). These “calls” involve a declaration by a local government, often directed at a particular country or nationality, offering incentives such as low-cost or free housing, jobs, schooling, and health care to anyone below a certain age who agrees to settle in a town for a minimum amount of time, usually at least 5 years. These calls have received extensive media coverage, and the reports often focus on individual protagonists and their stories, highlighting successful cases such as that of the Argentinian Cristián in “The Immigrant Who Arrived without Papers and Now Fights against Depopulation and Fire in Navarra” (Lasaosa, 2022); the Colombian Pedro in “The ‘Little Colombia’ of Carboneros, the Town of Jaén that Is Growing with the Help of Pedro, the Builder” (García Padilla, 2023); or the Venezuelan Wilmer José Pérez in “Back to the Town: The Platform that Helps you Find a House and Work to Repopulate Rural Spain” (Sánchez Becerril, 2021). Only when the coverage focuses on a particular nationality does it present its protagonists as part of a group, such as in “Spain Repopulates with a Colombian Accent” (Navarro, 2021); “The 700-Resident Town of Jaen which Offers Work and Lodging to Ecuadorians to Repopulate Two Villages” (Donaire, 2001); or “Venezuelan Children to Resurrect an Empty Town” (Martín, 2020).

Argentinians, Colombians, and Venezuelans make up one of the largest contingents of Latin Americans moving to the countryside, joining other immigrants from Romania and Morocco. Originally, such calls were the brainchild of Luis Bricio, the mayor of Aguaviva, a small town in Aragon, which in 2000 had only 650 inhabitants. The lack of workforce and the impossibility of attracting labor from within Spain led Bricio, at that time president of the Asociación de Municipios contra la Despoblación (Association of Towns Against Depopulation), to travel to Buenos Aires, where he presented his call-campaign. Argentina was ideal for his purposes, as it had a large number of potential settlers who shared the Spanish language. It would be easy, as well, to arrange jobs for newcomers because many Argentinians have dual EU citizenship as descendants of Spaniards, Italians, or Germans. Bricio’s llamada offered a job, lodging, free medical care, and schooling for children in exchange for spending at least 5 years in the town. The thirteen jobs that he offered asked for very specific conditions: applicants had to be couples under 40 years of age (which implied that potentially they could still have children) and with at least two children under 12 (proof that they were fertile). They also had to have dual citizenship. Some caveats were in place: applicants could not have college degrees, perhaps so they would be less likely to move to the city to seek employment there. And, as reported in the New York Times almost 3 years later, “When the mayor began his campaign in 2000, there were 37 children in the village school. Now there are more than 80” (Daly, 2003).

Documenting the llamada: The testimony of Aguaviva: La vida en tres maletas

Documentary cinema has found Aguaviva’s case particularly intriguing. At least three films are devoted to it: (Aguaviva, 2005 directed by Ariadna Pujol); Aguaviva: El abrazo de la tierra (2005, “Aguaviva: The Earth’s Embrace,” directed by José Luis Peñafuerte); and Aguaviva: La vida en tres maletas.¹ In what follows, I examine the earliest of these films, Aguaviva: La vida en tres maletas. Whereas the other two documentaries present a clear focus on the elders living in this town, Aguaviva: La vida en tres maletas directs its attention to the newcomers. In its nearly 46 min of runtime, it offers the audience a series of stories told by various protagonists, helping us appreciate the llamada’s intricacies from both sides. The film’s directors, Argentinian Verónica Marchiaro and Colombian Mario Burbano, reside in Germany, and the documentary was a co-production among the three countries. It was screened at many international festivals, such as the Miami Latin Film Festival (Miami, USA, 2004); the XIX Festival Internacional de Cine de Mar del Plata (XIX Mar del Plata International Film Festival, Mar del Plata, Argentina, 2004); the III Encuentro Hispanoamericano de Video Documental Independiente (III Hispanic-American Independent Documentary Video Conference, Mexico City, Mexico, 2004); the IV Muestra de Documentales y Fotografías de América Latina (IV Showcase of Documentary Film and Photography from Latin America, Albacete, Spain, 2004); and the IX Muestra Internacional Documental de Bogotá (IX Bogota International Documentary Film Festival, Bogotá, Colombia, 2007). The documentary’s screening in conferences and festivals throughout Latin America, Spain, and the United States indicates that the experiences of the protagonists resonate with viewers in all three spaces, and maps out the Latinx connection as a Transatlantic triangle.

Aguaviva: La vida en tres maletas opens with the image and words of four figures who speak directly to the camera, in markedly Argentinian accents, about their experiences:

“And the hardest thing is to get rid of a whole house, to put your whole life in three suitcases.”

“I don’t know what made us say we’re leaving, that we have to go […] we hadn’t found a place at that time, but now we have.”

“When we talked to my father, who came earlier, on the phone, […] I imagined it totally different, more like a city, but this is totally different, totally different.”

“Being in this town I don’t see any difference with where I lived; what’s more, where I lived was better than this town. So I say, the first world… the town disappointed me a bit when I saw it during the day.”

With these brief thoughts, the documentary places the audience at the origin of Bricio’s experiment––revealing its first effects on the immigrants themselves: their decision to settle in Spain, the expectations they had before coming, and their first impressions upon arrival. Uttered by a teenager and three middle-aged people, these brief observations talk about loss, deception, and disappointment. The first utterance also gives the documentary its title. The suitcases mark both the protagonists’ origin and the documentary’s story, but there is no clear explanation or metaphorical exploration as to why the protagonist has to pack everything in three suitcases. And yet this triad could be interpreted as the three particular moments of the journey the protagonists tend to highlight in the documentary: their decision to leave, the moment they arrive, and their settlement in the new land.

Strikingly, these initial utterances are immediately followed by shots of elderly inhabitants who walk in a leisurely manner through the streets and spend their hours playing cards. These images of a declining village are accompanied by a song by an Aguaviva local, who sings about the town’s past. Its lyrics speak of a “big town surrounded by flowers,” which contrasts with images of an aging town on its way to disappearing. The abrupt juxtaposition of realities like these––brought into contact only by the post-production editing process that pulls the story together––is a constant in the documentary. Its fragmented structure dramatizes the tension that has settled in the town as a result of the encounter between identities previously separated by the Atlantic. The separation between Spaniards and Latin Americans is accentuated by the insistence on presenting them in different frames, and on only one occasion does an Argentinian share the frame with two Spanish women. The split is reinforced by the lack of a narrator who could give unity to the story that the documentary is attempting to tell us. In addition to isolating the stories of its protagonists in this way, the aesthetic choice of using close-ups––and sometimes extreme close-ups––makes it difficult for the viewer to know the characters within a broader context. Their stories thus appear at first as a series of loose anecdotes. This fragmentary aesthetic is reinforced by recurring images that show a barren town, with deserted streets, empty bars, desolate roads, and a final long take of a walk to the cemetery.

The overall effect suggests a plurality of individual experiences and different sociocultural realities that inhabit Aguaviva: Spaniards happy with the arrival of immigrants; Spaniards who criticize immigrants; immigrants who would like to leave the village; and immigrants who have decided to settle in the town for the long term. This diversity of perspectives, reinforced by the insistence on close-ups that confine viewers to individual experiences, seems to portray a series of disconnected stories. Working against this, however, are the words of the mayor, Luis Bricio, inserted as brief thoughts throughout the documentary, which put the different parties in contact and allow us to weave an interlocking narrative about repopulation. Bricio’s remarks focus on Aguaviva as a possible model of coexistence, the relevance of the idea of hospitality and integration, and the complex and fragile balance between difference and commonality. By taking the themes that Bricio proposes as a common thread––and zooming out of particular perspectives to see them as part of the larger space in which they coexist––the documentary links those seemingly disconnected anecdotes as pieces of a comprehensive and cohesive story, the tale of a new Aguaviva that has a chance to breathe again.

Bricio shows a clear awareness of the difficulty of being a pioneer in this type of initiative. He comments that his hope is: “to create a town in which different cultures coexist and are capable of integrating into the native culture while conserving their own culture […] because it would turn this into a people that would be an example for many others.” From the beginning, Bricio touches on one of the most delicate points of repopulation: the balance between difference and integration. His words make it clear that there is a perceived us-them binary between the Spanish and the foreigners. On one hand, they bring a new culture that will potentially enrich the town, and on the other, they possess a culture foreign to the native people.

The foreigner that Bricio talks about is the same one that Georg Simmel (1972) presents to us in his well-known essay on “The Stranger”: “He [the stranger] is fixed within a particular spatial group. […] But his position in this group is determined, essentially, by the fact that he has not belonged to it from the beginning, that he imports qualities into it” (143). Bricio’s idea is that Aguaviva can become a space where differences will coexist but won’t be forced to assimilate, where there will be integration without loss of culture. But how does that ideal translate into reality? The immigrant Bricio is talking about is not a guest who has a departure date, but a “stranger” who has come to stay. In seeing the people originating from Latin America as strangers, Bricio does not intend to discriminate against them, but rather to notice their difference as something positive. Nevertheless, recognizing difference entails an inevitable difficulty when it comes to integration. In his words: “Integration is not a process of arriving and that’s it, right? It is a process that requires time, you have to give it time. If people arrive here, stay for 3 months, and then leave, integration will not take place. We need a minimum time for the integration to take place.” Although Bricio’s goal is integration, the documentary cannot deliver this outcome, as Aguaviva’s story remains in a state of unfolding.

The possibility of integration, via Bricio’s idea of hospitality, needs elaboration. Jacques Derrida (2000) talks about two types of hospitality: unconditional and conditional. Unconditional and absolute hospitality requires, in his terms, that “I open up my home and that I give [place] not only to the foreigner […] but to the absolute, unknown, anonymous other, […] without asking of them either reciprocity (entering into a pact) or even their names” (24). This is not Aguaviva’s case: to be admitted into the community, the “strangers” had to meet the series of prerequisites mentioned earlier. Aguaviva’s welcome depends on a pact of conditional hospitality where the door is opened to the newcomer only when certain conditions have been met. The conditions of hospitality work both ways, since the guest also expects reciprocity: access to work, lodging, healthcare, and schooling in exchange for staying in the town and contributing to its population growth and economy. In theory, hospitality emerges from a pact that should benefit both parties.

The encounter, however, provokes a tension that is ingrained in the very etymology of the word hospitality, since “hospitality” (hospitalidad) and “hostility” (hostilidad) share the common root hostis: a foreigner who can be either a welcomed “guest” or an unwanted “enemy.” The Latin Americans in Aguaviva are guests. They fit the desired profile and have willingly answered Bricio’s call. But even though they are all welcomed at first, their position as guests still emphasizes their foreignness, their status as strangers to Spain. A person is only a guest as long as the host agrees to welcome them. Because they are guests, they will also always be strangers. In Derrida’s understanding, hospitality thus requires and creates two opposing identities: one that belongs, and one that does not.

Such a tension is reflected in one of Bricio’s voiceovers, when he notes: “Hospitality is the most important value that rural areas have, and these areas always offer it to newcomers. But if you bite the hand of the person who feeds you or of the person who has helped you, the rejection is automatically absolute.” Bricio’s proposal of conditional hospitality brings a complex power dynamic into play. As Gerasimos Kakoliris (2015) explains in relation to the “pervertibility” of the law of hospitality: “There is no hospitality […] without the sovereignty of the person who offers hospitality in his or her house. Therefore, there is an essential ‘self-restraint’ incorporated in the idea of hospitality that maintains the distance between what belongs to the host and the foreigner” (148). Both parties have to abide by the terms of the agreement if they want hospitality to succeed. But by speaking of “biting the hand that feeds you,” Bricio seems to put any blame for the failure of hospitality solely on the wrong-doing of foreigners, contradicting the apparent balance that he presented in his original contract-call.

This image of the Latin American stranger biting the hand of the host is echoed in another comment, from an elderly Spanish inhabitant of Aguaviva: “They give little life to the town, so if these towns are meant to die, they will die… They should stop coming to Spain, there are enough of us already. Why have they brought them if there are no jobs? […] There are many muggings and robberies….” This speaker, too, presents the “strangers” as breaking the hospitality pact, failing to bring “life” to Aguaviva. Moreover, he seems to see Aguaviva as a microcosm of all of Spain: if foreigners cannot help this town, they should not come to the rest of the country either. And this negative narrative culminates with the idea of criminalization: although he doesn’t say so directly, he insinuates that the increase in crime is due to the newcomers’ arrival. To justify his rejection of the foreigner, this speaker agglomerates all these ideas into a single brief statement. If the foreigners do not peacefully occupy their designated place, the Spanish are supposedly justified in denying their hospitality.

At the moment this speaker mentions the “mugging and lots of robberies,” however, we hear a very warm and cheerful “Hello” coming from out of frame. The camera immediately pivots from the Spaniard to show us the origin of the greeting: a group of children who, walking through the square, greet the camera enthusiastically. “They themselves are foreigners,” adds the Spaniard with clear antipathy and distance. The vision of the children walking placidly through the town square with their snacks in their hands helps the documentary question the speaker’s words associating immigration with crime.

To return to the present day for a moment, we might note that the connection between young immigrants and crime presented in this scene resonates in contemporary Spain with the discourse of “menas” (menores extranjeros no acompañados, or unaccompanied foreign minors). In recent years, following the discriminatory rhetoric of extreme right-wing parties such as VOX, many mass media outlets have dedicated multiple headlines to presenting “menas” as criminals, including: “According to the City Police, the Maghrebian Menas Commit 80% of the Crimes in Barcelona” (Planes, 2022); or “Menas’ Crimes Increase in Madrid: They Are Three out of Four Detainees” (Gómez and Roces, 2020). Although this narrative is widespread, it coexists with a discourse that tries to counteract the idea of criminality, with headlines such as: “In Murcia There Are no Gangs of Menas: 99% of the Detainees Are Spanish” (Lucas A, 2022); or “Against the Criminalization of Menas: No Aid, No Salary, No Crime” (Ros, 2019). But the coexistence of these two discourses has a longer trajectory, as Aguaviva evinces. In fact, this scene in the town square presents a rare moment in which Aguaviva does not edit the scene in post-production to shape the narrative. Here, the Spaniard and the foreign children appear in different frames, except when the children pass quickly by him for less than a second. During this extremely brief moment, when both Spaniard and migrants share the same frame, the Spaniard pointedly avoids all possibility of contact by looking away. Even though it is a brief instance, the film makes sure to capture this moment, undermining the idea of migrant criminals, and showing that the children are bringing “life” to the town. It is the Spaniard who refuses to recognize this. This moment both dramatizes the antipathy and points to a way out of it.

A negative vision of the “other,” however, does not appear only on the Spanish side. An Argentinian in the film tells us: “It is difficult to go unnoticed in this small town… You live locked up. Or if you go out, you take the car and go. I don’t go to bars here, I don’t hang around here. I stay at home, or go to a friend’s house for dinner, or we leave town.” Previously Bricio and the Spaniard carried the movie’s voice, but here we see a change in the power dynamics where the guest and the host engage. This Argentinian has not been able to find a permanent job in the town. Disappointed with his situation and his wife’s, which they blame on Aguaviva’s unwillingness to help them, he takes away his business, as this is what can hurt Aguaviva the most. Thus, the film juxtaposes scenes in which a Spaniard does not accept immigrants as guests, and in which the immigrant does not feel accepted, revealing their inability to find a common ground.

Although the complaints of Spaniards and Latin Americans prevail in the documentary, Aguaviva also offers more harmonious voices. Gilda decides to leave Argentina because of her country’s economic crisis, answering Bricio’s call and moving to Spain in 2000. In Aguaviva her daughter is born; and soon after her parents move to Aguaviva to be with her. Through this family, we meet three generations of women: Gilda’s mother (a woman from Argentina); Gilda (introduced in the subtitles as “Argentinian,” but who we learn later also has Italian citizenship through her father); and Rocío Verónica, Gilda’s daughter (presented as “aguavivana,” “a native of Aguaviva,” in the subtitles). We meet Gilda’s mother as she walks down the street pushing her granddaughter’s stroller. As a group of elderly Spanish women walking along with her disperses, she stays with the camera and says: “If it weren’t for this town, I would have already returned. But here you saw how the people are, very good, very good are the people here.” Right before “ya me habría vuelto” (I would have already returned), her voice breaks, and the viewer can feel her pain. She regains her composure when she talks about the goodness of the village’s people. This scene suggests the success of hospitality, and the beginning of a sense of belonging for Gilda’s mother.

As for Gilda herself, she explains to the camera that “I feel very comfortable, and I feel like I’ve lived [in Aguaviva] for many years, but there are things that don’t…” Her voice trails off here and the viewers are left to guess what is not working out for her. We might say that Gilda presents herself as a stranger in Simmel’s sense, a person who does not share an origin with the people of the host country, but who has nevertheless come to stay. She has developed a particular hybrid sense of belonging that makes her feel part of the community. At the same time, this hybridity is a constant reminder of her strangeness. She explains her sense of belonging with the following example: “Around here, when people talk about Asturias [i.e., when they speak of other regions in Spain], I don’t know how to imagine it.” But when she mentions Argentina’s provinces and its different accents, her eyes sparkle. As a “stranger,” she has not belonged to Aguaviva from the beginning; her origins in Argentina will always be part of her, even though her place is now in Spain.

Gilda has thus become a trans-Atlantic figure who has moved from a former colony to the former “motherland.” This former mother-metropolis is now barren, and here Latin American women emerge as former “daughters” who are now mothers, with the power to create the life that Aguaviva needs to survive. The Latin American “stranger” becomes familiar, and even acquires a position of power thanks to the host country’s need for foreigners. Spain is no longer the host that helps the guest; now Latin American women have become the mothers of a Spain that is dying, and they are bearing the children who will save the towns. They have become what Michel Agier (2018) posits as “national strangers.” This condition requires strangers to grasp hospitality as a right rather than a mere duty or act of compassion. As nationals, these strangers’ right to stay should then be enforceable, and hospitality should no longer be perceived as a favor (Agier, 141). While gesturing toward this endpoint, the documentary shows Aguaviva is not there yet. As Gilda explains: “being an immigrant… one never forgets one’s roots and is always homesick… It’s not my land.” And here she gestures at her baby daughter Rocío Verónica, whom she is holding in her arms: “It could be her land, she was born here, but it’s not mine.” Rocío Verónica was introduced earlier in the film, in the subtitles, as “aguavivana.” Her grandmother, too, says she is “aguavivana, ella es aragonesa, maña” (“she is from Aguaviva, from Aragon, maña”). These three generations of women exemplify three different stages of belonging in the repopulation process: Gilda’s mother presents herself solely as Argentinian; Gilda has developed a sense of belonging to both Argentina and Spain, and she can legally stay in Spain because of her European passport; and baby Rocío Verónica is presented as belonging to Aguaviva (aguavivana) and to the region of Aragon where Aguaviva is located (aragonesa). The third word used by the grandmother, maña, refers specifically to people who live near the Ebro River that crosses Aragon. This term can only be used for natives who are born and raised in the region, and so it connotes a strong idea of belonging. The word maña is particularly poignant here. It expresses both the grandmother’s own sense of foreignness and her hope that her granddaughter really does belong to Spain. Rocío Verónica is Spanish by birth, but her parents are both European and Argentinian. The spectator is left wondering what Rocío Verónica’s own sense of belonging will be when she grows up, and what level of “strangeness,” if any, she will experience.

Latinos in empty Spain: Strengthening the third vertex of the Latinx triangle

The documentary tells the story of a particular town, but the variety of voices it presents and the numerous llamadas that have taken place in rural Spain since 2000 encourage us to see this story as a microcosm of what is happening in Spain today. Who, then, are the “Latin Americans” in rural Spain? Who are these people who have raised the towns’ population numbers in the official census, who are the reason Aguaviva holds a Latin American music festival, who have brought yerba mate to the farmer’s market, and whose customs are now taught in the elementary schools? One thing the film helps us see is that people of Latin American origin form an enormously diverse group in rural Spain.

They include younger children born abroad who are oblivious to the conditions their parents had to meet to come to Aguaviva; Latin American teenagers integrating into a new culture and getting ready to go to college (they will soon move to urban areas); Latin American parents with double citizenship or holders of a Latin American passport with a work permit for Spain; and grandparents who have joined their children’s families. At the time the film was made, a new generation, born in Spain, was also just starting to become visible. Rocío Verónica is part of this generation. Today, they are young adults, joining the workforce and forming their own identities. There is still no consensus about how to refer to them: “new Spaniards,” “second generation immigrants,” people with a cultural hybrid identity, or simply Spaniards. Aguaviva: La vida en tres maletas does not offer the viewer a definite answer about the future of Bricio’s initiative. Yet it gives the viewer a glimpse of the origins of new identities that will very likely have multilayered modes of belonging.²

Filmed in 2004, Aguaviva: La vida en tres maletas offers an impressionistic narrative of a reality that was just beginning to appear in Spain at the time. The documentary presents various, and often opposing, views, but all of them coexisting in a single space. These individual stories are well-defined, separate, and visible strokes which contain particular experiences; in presenting isolated strands without forcing them into a single narrative, the film seeks to preserve our sense of the problematic of the llamada, the potential for both conflict and harmony. All the stories come together as in a painting, presenting the rich and difficult reality of the encounter between the two shores of the Atlantic. Today, some 20 years later, Latin American migrants are still settling in rural Spain, but the children who came at a young age with the first llamadas, as well as those who were born in Spain to Latin American parents, are now adults. This new generation now coexists with those who came over 20 years ago, and with newcomers who are still arriving and settling in Spanish villages. If the first calls were aimed largely at Argentina and Venezuela, Colombians and Ecuadorians are now also participating in large numbers.

Alongside the more visible presence of Latin Americans in large Spanish cities such as Madrid and Barcelona and the emergence of spaces such as “Nueva Miami” or “El triángulo latino” in Madrid, Aguaviva: La vida en tres maletas shows the importance of considering the Latin American presence in rural Spain. Indeed, it reveals that rural towns are an ideal space to explore how a diversity of experiences is contributing greatly to the vibrancy of Spain’s Latinx community, fracturing the homogeneity usually attached to the idea of the immigrant. The presence of Latin Americans in rural areas may thus be laying the groundwork for rethinking the meaning of Latinx in Spain, beyond people originating from Latin America. As “strangers” in Simmel’s (1972) and (Agier, 2018) sense, rural Spain’s Latinx community is there to stay, but its diversity is reflected in the variety of names used for this community. People born in Latin America are usually referred to as “latinos” or “latinoamericanos” in Spain; so are people born in Spain to Latin American parents.

Even though a large percentage of “latinos” have Spanish nationality, the use of terms like this one underlines a difference in origin from Spaniards. Mass media also commonly uses the controversial term “nuevos españoles” (“New Spaniards”) to talk about the new generation (who are mostly Spaniards). Afroespañoles (Afro-Spaniards) and chiñoles (Spaniards whose parents are Chinese) are also examples of young people who have begun to organize around common origins. And although the term “Latinx” itself is not widespread in Spain’s daily parlance, it circulates among activists, intellectuals, and cultural workers who identify politically as racialized migrants and are mindful of the necessity of employing gender-neutral language. After 20 years, this community of “latinos,” “latinoamericanos,” “Latinx,” and “New Spaniards” now forms part of the consolidated rich and diverse presence that is an integral part of the third vertex of the emerging Transatlantic Latinx triangle of Latin America, the United States, and Spain. This third vertex is not homogeneous. Their members have different origins, senses of belonging, and levels of integration, ranging from alienation to status as “familiar strangers” to near-total integration as Spaniards. Beginning with the first llamadas in 2000, they brought their rich diversity into a space that was dying, and have created new identities in the process.

In 2021, José Luis Escrivá, Minister of Inclusion, Social Security, and Migrations, received a letter from Francisco Igea, vice president of the Junta de Castilla y León, the regional government of one of Spain’s most depopulated areas. Igea proposed central government policies that would counter depopulation by promoting immigration. In a meeting with the Nueva Economía Forum (New Economy Forum) on 28 June 2021, Escrivá stated: “I think this is great, it is an idea we have in mind” (cited in Alvarado, 2021). These kinds of conversations continued into 2022, when Escrivá argued that “We need to take measures to encourage migrants to go to those areas and repopulate them” (cited in Martín de Vidales, 2022).

This idea has appeared repeatedly in newspapers and official conversations, although it tends to appear without context––and always without any reference to the pioneers who arrived in 2000 and who, since then, have raised a new generation in Spain. Returning to documentaries like Aguaviva: La vida en tres maletas may be particularly helpful at this moment. The film helps us understand the intricacies of what repopulation entails both for nationals and foreigners, and the different––and even paradoxical––outcomes this kind of initiative may have. The documentary reveals that migration is not just the source of a labor force or “repopulation.” This film itself is a llamada to understand the layering and ramifications of migrant identities. The different points of view on hospitality and the variety of identities Aguaviva: La vida en tres maletas reveals can bring empathy and complexity to the current conversation, propelling us to weigh in on the manifold dynamics of both migration and repopulation.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Raquel Vega-Durán

Notes

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