By: Alfredo Cohen
“That they collapse health, that they don’t pay taxes, that nobody inspects their stores, that they are uncivil and are one of the causes of lack of work.” Although our history has been constructed through migratory flows, rumours coming from stereotypes attributed to people of different origins are still a reality. It doesn’t matter if these people arrived a week ago or 10 years ago, if you have a different accent or another skin color, you are very likely to face discrimination at one time or another.
Here are some of Google’s suggestions for completing the sentence…
If we focus on specific groups, things seem to get worse: “That the Chinese are invading us, that South Americans are making a lot of noise, that Roma are stealing, that Arabs are sexist, that Africans are violent”. It should be noted that these stereotypes were already present in other migratory flows, also within Spain, and it was said that the Andalusians were lazy, that the Basques were closed and the Catalans stingy.
Stereotypes don’t just affect foreigners.
Dismantling are audiovisual pieces that dismantle myths, prejudices and rumors about cultural diversity in Barcelona and that we develop from elParlante to the Menéndez y Pelayo secondary school in Sarrià. These participatory videos explain four fictions that broaden the view of different groups with whom we share the city of Barcelona, to defend what unites us and enjoy what differentiates us.
The project is carried out during a week in June in which the young participants assume the workshop as their Research Project of 4th ESO. During the 5 mornings, students of different classes generate dynamics of collective work and discuss the vision of television and other media. The central theme is cultural diversity and migrations to investigate the reality of cultures that coexist in Catalonia and build fiction scripts that will be recorded and edited.
Since 2014, we have made 6
Desmuntamites
And this month they present a new short film full of humour that helps to reflect on the imaginaries associated with people of Latin American origin. Below we leave you with a piece of what happened behind the cameras and the reflections that the participants made. The day September 27th we will present the final product in the auditorium of the institute.
From a conceptual point of view, what
Desmuntamites intends
is to use information and communication technologies (ICT) in a participatory way, to generate crossovers between citizens, horizontal, collaborative and cooperative encounters, which are already causing social changes around the world. It is a “critical pedagogy” or “radical” that Giroux (1997), MacLaren and Kincheloe (2008) talked about, focusing on the need for education to contribute to the tasks of criticism and reflection on historical relations of oppression; discovering the ways in which power operates and contributing to the rescue and socialization of other knowledge, looks and expressions that have been systematically silenced. With Desmuntamites
, young people belonging to a school with little cultural diversity, from a privileged socio-economic neighborhood of the city, take the floor and show that they are interested in the social realities of the whole city.