racism

   Spain has arguably a less severe problem of racism than other European countries, which may be due to the relatively lower proportion of immigrants. Nevertheless, there is a traditional antagonism towards gypsies on the part of the settled community, despite the fact that these nomadic groups have been in Spain for at least five hundred years, and have enriched popular culture with, for example, flamenco music and dance. Plans by town councils to provide fixed accommodation for gypsy communities have on occasion provoked opposition from residents, intensifying the tendency for gypsies to concentrate in shanty towns near big cities, where they are forced to live in very unfavourable conditions. Intermarriage between the gypsy and settled communities (the payos, as the gypsies call them) is rare, which perpetuates the mutual feeling of separateness and impedes the breaking-down of prejudice on both sides. In an effort to discourage stereotyping, voluntary organizations, and government agencies such as the Youth Institute of the Ministry of Social Affairs, have mounted advertising campaigns on television to outlaw the use of words like gitano as a term of abuse or mockery.

   Prejudice against gypsies is probably the only major area in which community attitudes continue to have primarily an ethnic or cultural base. It is true that historically antagonism towards Muslims and Jews on religious grounds was deep-rooted, and traces of this remain. Apart from gypsies, however, hostility towards particular groups tends to be primarily economic in origin. Since the early 1980s there has been a marked increase in immigration from the poorer strata of countries in North Africa and Latin America. Immigrants from North Africa come mainly in search of seasonal work during the grape, olive or fruit harvests, and some of the most important fruitgrowing areas have witnessed attacks on immigrant workers by gangs of local youths. Arrivals from sub-Saharan Africa have apparently encountered less hostility, since, engaged as they are predominantly in small-scale street-trading, they are not perceived as constituting a large homogeneous group concentrated in a particular locality, and in any case contact with the resident population is minimal.

   In theory, immigrants from Latin America should find it easier to be accepted and integrated, because of the shared linguistic and cultural inheritance. In practice, however, this applies more readily to well-educated professionals, and since the early 1980s these have increasingly been replaced by women from poorer backgrounds who come in search of employment as domestic servants. Some of these people have been subjected to violent attacks, sometimes with fatal consequences, by small ultra-right groups analogous to the skinheads and football hooligans found in every western European country.

   See also: social attitudes; society

   CARLOS ÁLVAREZ ARAGÜÉS