In Luis Buñuel’s extraordinary film, ‘’This Strange Passion’’, the main character suffers a series of visual hallucinations and ends up horrified by the influence of auditory hallucinations. In Henry James’s dazzling novel ‘’The Turn of the Screw’’, a boy and a girl believe they see two adult carers who have already disappeared and who have inflicted evil on them in their entrails.
A hallucination is a cognitive distortion produced by an alteration of the senses that can be spontaneous or produced by the interest of those who suffer these distortions. Thus, when faced with a simple rodent, one can believe that it is a rabid animal or one can suppose that a person similar to someone who attacked us in childhood is a permanent enemy of ours.
We are currently living in a century of great diasporas, where multiple migrations of various types occur and nations cease to be self-sufficient and become filled with colors, smells and flavors from very different origins. Faced with such a situation, racists and xenophobes begin to suffer from delirium tremens when they conceive of migrants as repulsive, detestable and undesirable beings.
Here we find a contradiction: many big businessmen, especially in the most developed world, require migrants because they are workers who offer cheap labor, require little or no social assistance, suffer over-exploitation, and are easily disposable and deportable when circumstances require it.
But the large magnates are currently faced with the unpleasant surprise that millions of migrants and refugees are fleeing their places of origin, increasing in a protuberant manner, what is worse, organizing themselves to demand their labor and cultural rights, seeking equity with native workers in the receiving countries.
Monocultural areas no longer exist in almost the entire world; in almost all places multiculturalism is becoming established as something habitual in everyday life. Mexican migrants, for example, who in the United States are estimated to number between 12 and 18 million according to various figures, have stopped subordinating themselves to the melting pot and are enriching the neighboring country with an enormous amount of cultural traits and complexities.
The most effective way to combat the mind-boggling racism and xenophobia is to understand otherness, to understand the different one as someone close and to reach a series of common agreements, as a kind of existential common denominator despite the dissimilar personal trajectories of the subjects involved.
Contemporary migrations will necessarily cause qualitative changes in the relations between capital and labor and in what concerns the development of new cultural formations in the different nations of the world. These changes, of course, will provoke serious inter-ethnic conflicts and between different national groups; unfortunately, genocidal attacks such as those carried out by the Israeli government in the Gaza Strip and in Lebanon cannot be ruled out in the near future.
If the green light is given to these mass murders, it will not be surprising that in the near future various populations may suffer the same aggressions and crimes that the Palestinians suffer; in this regard, it would not be surprising if in a few days to come many of our compatriots even suffer armed aggressions by white supremacists supporters of Mr. Donald Trump and even worse thugs. And let us remember that the great singer Joan Manuel Serrat has declared that the Mediterranean Sea is a great sarcophagus of migrants, many of whom have died not only from accidental disturbances, but from deliberate attacks against them.
At the time I write this text I think of the remarkable event that the National Institute of Anthropology and History will carry out from November 5th to 8th of this year; broadcast online on YouTube INAH TV from 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. This is the third colloquium on the impact of migration in a globalized world, in which leading specialists in issues related to migration flows will address this subject in the greatest possible depth, trying to lay the foundations for the establishment of democratic migration policies, supported by the migrant sectors themselves and their negotiations and agreements with the notable variety of states that exist on this planet.
Original article by Francisco Javier Guerrero, La Jornada, November 6th, 2024.
Translated by Schools for Chiapas.