2023-07-10 00:13:49
In Spain, millions of people are poor, and only they know it, because they manage to keep up appearances. But they wear second-hand clothes, when they get home they can’t turn on the heating and they stop hanging out with their usual friends: they no longer have the money to go to the movies or to dine at a restaurant. One in five Spaniards is at risk of poverty, one in ten has fallen into severe poverty and 40,000 live on the street, and yet their reality does not seem to matter to almost anyone. They are ‘The invisible Spain’, the title of the new book (published by Arpa) by journalist and writer Sergio Fanjul (Oviedo, 1980), an exhaustive analysis of all the faces of poverty that, in addition to data, provides the testimony of people who live on the street or who frequent shelters and soup kitchens.
“Someone has always spoken for the poor, they have not been listened to,” says Fanjul, who acknowledges that debating poverty “is not sexy”, especially when culture wars seem to dominate the public agenda. «We prefer to discuss the trans law or the concept of nation, which are more emotional issues. For this reason, once again, the poor are the forgotten ones”, explains the essayist and also a poet, who has taken advantage of his vocation as a walker to observe the people who have less on the street. «You cannot recognize most of the poor. Many of them belonged to the middle class and suddenly, for some reason, find themselves thrown out of the system. And when that happens, his feeling is shame, which is hidden, “says Fanjul, who in the book exposes, among many others, the story of a young married couple who survive in precariousness until he falls into poverty. “And then they can’t do the reform that their house needs so that their son, who is in a wheelchair, can get around.” Situations that lead those who suffer from them to another type of misfortune, the “diseases of despair”, such as stress, anxiety, depression or drug addiction, which in turn cause hundreds of deaths. “It is a phenomenon that has been widely studied in the United States, but not yet in Spain, where, on the other hand, we do know that we are one of the countries that consumes the most anxiolytics, which should tell us something”, points out the author of books such as ‘La infinite city’ or ‘instantaneous life’.
But what happens for someone to become poor? “To a large extent, poverty is hereditary. If your family was poor, chances are you are poor too. But many other things can happen: bad luck, a stroke of fate… What is clear is that someone is not poor because they deserve it. Almost no one falls into poverty for being lazy and a thug.
On this point, Fanjul is very critical of the speeches that transfer the responsibility for poverty to those who suffer from it. «There is an ideological umbrella to justify poverty that is very comforting because it exempts us from any responsibility. If the poor person is poor because he deserves it, nothing happens if measures are not taken to remedy his situation, “says Fanjul, who is very critical of the discourse of meritocracy and positive thinking. «Entrepreneurs boast of having failed many times before succeeding, but who can fail? Those who have a mattress. To succeed, many factors come into play: talent, of course, but that’s not meritocracy; let the market buy your talent (being a great soccer player is not the same as being the best in badminton); how lucky you are in life; and above all, the economic situation of your family. Effort counts, of course, but believing that success always corresponds to effort belongs to magical thinking.
“Part of the Landscape”
Living on the street is the maximum point of poverty, a pit in which 40,000 Spaniards find themselves. “Actually, the number is not very high, and it could be managed, but we find that neoliberal ideology does not help. In fact, empathy towards the homeless is being lost, also taking into account that the homeless have a life expectancy 30 years less than the population as a whole. In New York, they are already considered part of the landscape, like skyscrapers, and here we are going the same way.
In this sense, Fanjul notes with astonishment how phenomena that seemed typical of the United States begin to reach Spain. “We are a province of the empire, but it is incredible, for example, that we are starting to see that some people have to live in caravans because they cannot pay the rent. That is the maximum precariousness. In another time it would have seemed unworthy to us, but now we are normalizing it, ”laments the writer.
Can something be done to eradicate poverty or, at least, to put an end to the most painful? “That is the million dollar question,” acknowledges Fanjul, and although there are no magical solutions, he points to proposals that have been successfully tested elsewhere. «In Central Europe and in the Nordic countries, programs called ‘Housing first’ (the first thing, the house) were launched. They consisted of giving a person who lived on the street the keys to a house without conditions, beyond the basic ones. And it was discovered that whoever had a place to sleep integrated more easily into society. In the Lavapies neighborhood, in Madrid, this model has been tested, which is not so difficult to carry out.
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