I have always thought that little is said about second generations.
I mean those children of immigrants who feel that they are neither from here nor from there. Now, with the exceptional journalistic work of the Documentary ‘800 metros’ on the attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils, there has been talk again about how these young people became radicalized. But it won’t last long because it is a topic that stings. And that as a society we should be ashamed.
I am a second generation. Daughter of a married couple who sadly left their home so that their children could learn something beyond the four letters that was what they managed to know. We studied, but we were never the same. And not because I felt it, but because despite being able to stand out you were always on loan, you were always second class. I made an effort to be loved for my skills, not for my person, because that, as the word says, is personal. But not even with objective data could I get the place I deserved. I got answers from the type that my Catalan was very much from L’Hospitalet. And I thought that Hospitalet was also Catalonia. I felt even worse when I arrived at my parents’ town and those who had stayed there said: “The foreigners are coming & rdquor ;, referring to the “Catalans & rdquor; and the “Madrilenians” who had emigrated. Where was I from? Both here and there, he was from nowhere. Not without suffering it, I put it on my back and kept going.
But if that has been my experience coming from the same country, what can we expect from the boys who come from another continent. With a different skin color, and from a society where religion has an enormous weight. What is it to be integrated? Speak the same language, be in school, have a job… We have a lot to do and it all starts with having respect. No one chooses where they are born and no one leaves their home for pleasure to go to a strange land. We have to see the second generations as a capital, a cultural bridge. But for that you need to treat them as equals. Without suspicion. Feeling that you belong to a place is that they really make you feel it, not that they let you be there and that you have to be grateful. Let us think that radicalizing agents play with this lack of roots to indoctrinate young minds. Young people with tender hearts and malleable brains who only want to be loved and made to feel necessary.