By Diego Salazar
Perhaps the greatest challenge of the present is to understand that the struggle for cultural rights is also a struggle for the right to life. Because those who are left out of the narrative are also left out of protection.
When violence becomes routine, it ceases to provoke scandal and begins to be called normality. December has been proof of this. In just a few weeks, a succession of political decisions and public scenes has laid bare, without disguise, how the European social contract is being redefined along racial lines, also in Catalonia and Spain.
At the beginning of the month, the Council of the European Union approved decrees that facilitate mass deportations and consolidate the externalisation of borders, violating fundamental rights and international law itself. Days later, during an event organised by the Government of Catalonia —paradoxically— dedicated to the International Day of Migrants, two anti-racist activists were expelled for denouncing the eviction of the B9 Institute in Badalona, which was carried out the following day: more than 400 migrant people were left on the street, exposed to the winter cold. Shortly after, a group of neighbours blocked access to a church to prevent temporary shelter for fifteen of them. That same week, the closure of Periferia Cimarronas, was also announced, the first Black theatre in Spain, an Afro-centred project that has built community and critical thought from the margins of an institutional framework that never fully embraced it.
It may seem like a concatenation of isolated events. In reality, it is the expression of a structural problem. Migration policies, the cultural system, and the national imaginary converge in the same architecture of exclusion: one that administers material and symbolic dispossession as routine, that expels bodies and erases voices, that legislates inequality while proclaiming universal rights.
The closure of Periferia Cimarronas is also a symptom of the political hollowing-out of the Catalan and Spanish cultural system, which for years has promoted diversity as an aesthetic without assuming it as a structure.
The timing is particularly revealing. That all of this happens in the days leading up to Christmas, the great celebration of peace and fraternity in the Christian calendar, is not only a cruel irony. It exposes how the language of rights has become a rhetorical device that conceals the hypocrisy of the public apparatus. Europe celebrates the birth of a refugee child while criminalising those who flee wars that it itself fuels; Catalonia celebrates “the day of migrants” while repressing and evicting racialised bodies from their living spaces; the Church preaches welcome while part of its congregation raises walls in the name of fear and identity purity.
What unfolds is not a sum of incidents, but a necropolitics: the capacity of the State and society to decide who lives and who dies, who deserves shelter and who can be cast into exposure. This logic is not exercised only through laws or police forces. It is also sustained by a more subtle machinery: that of normalised institutional racism, which distributes humanity along hierarchical scales and reserves compassion for some while administering suspicion toward others.
The eviction of the B9 Institute in Badalona shows the most atrocious face of this order. There, exclusion materialises in stone and concrete: racialised bodies treated as urban waste, municipal policies that turn hardship into a disciplinary spectacle, media discourses that rewrite the victim as a threat. In contrast, the closure of Periferia Cimarronas reveals the other face of the same device: symbolic eradication, the silencing of voices that speak from Blackness, migration, and dissent.
Both forms operate across different frontiers —the urban and the cultural— but respond to the same principle: the country that expels bodies is the same one that shuts down imaginaries. Where precarity takes away housing, racism takes away voice. One denies shelter; the other denies the possibility of narrating oneself, of being seen, of existing in the shared space. They are two complementary ways of restricting citizenship and sustaining the fiction of a homogeneous, white, and morally intact nation.
The closure of Periferia Cimarronas is also a symptom of the political hollowing-out of the Catalan and Spanish cultural system, which for years has promoted diversity as an aesthetic without assuming it as a structure. The few spaces sustained by racialised and migrant communities survive with scarce public support, trapped in the precarity that the same “inclusive” policies claim to combat. When an Afro-centred theatre disappears, it is not only a cultural loss: it is the symbolic expression of the same violence that leaves hundreds of people without a home.
However, migrant and racialised cultural production continues to be a luminous crack in that wall. It is not only aesthetic resistance, but a politics of the living: a practice of reappropriating space, of rewriting memory, of expanding what is possible.
Racism in Spain no longer needs to declare itself. It filters into everyday life, into administrative gestures, into selective compassion. It speaks of integration while legislating deportations; it speaks of interculturality while dismantling spaces of autonomy. It is sustained, above all, by indifference: by the moral fatigue of a society that, saturated with images of pain, has confused empathy with spectacle.
However, migrant and racialised cultural production continues to be a luminous crack in that wall. It is not only aesthetic resistance, but a politics of the living: a practice of reappropriating space, of rewriting memory, of expanding what is possible. This culture does not ask for inclusion: it exercises political imagination.
Perhaps the greatest challenge of the present is to understand that the struggle for cultural rights is also a struggle for the right to life. Because those who are left out of the narrative are also left out of protection. And because a country that expels the most vulnerable from the territory and the most uncomfortable from discourse cannot call itself democratic.
In this Christmas of 2025, while Europe projects borders overseas and Spain warns about “extremisms” and “disinformation”, it is important not to lose sight of what is essential: the real crisis is not migratory, it is the renunciation of the welfare state to guarantee universal rights, first for migrant people and then for society as a whole.
And what may open a way out will not be the charity of the centre, but the imagination of the margins. That place from which we still rehearse —against the current— the radical art of caring for each other in community.
