559.3
Immigrants’ Sons: Power, Violence and Resistance in an Urban Context
Despite its own history as a migration village (indeed, A Coruña is a city built on those who left towards Latin America and Europe and also on those who came from the rural areas), complex forms of racist violence arise in the streets and in the schools, affecting deeply the lives of those children that, regarded and classified as `outsiders´, have to grow up here, facing not only the constant mistreatment they are submitted to by other scholars and neighbors but also that one their parents and love ones are forced to put up with.
In those neighborhoods where poverty and marginalization was already the norm before the arrival of immigrant people, the aggravation of the situation since the outbreak of the economic crisis in 2008, combined with the roughly traditionally xenophobic ideology of a society, do not forget, nurtured and supported by national and regional governments and media; violent acts against immigrants and their children constitute a hard but undeniable reality.
This research, carried out in the popular districts of A Coruña, tries to reveal how this everyday violence experiences impacts the consciousness of these children, shaping their development as human beings and provoking different reactions to it: from the interiorization of the hegemonic classist and racist discourses predominant in the environment, its reproduction and consequently, the emerging of self-hating feelings; to the rejection of the (un)welcoming society, but usually standing in a resistance position in the middle of both damaging options.
1 A Coruña is a village placed in the Northwest coast of Galicia (Spain).