For a few weeks now, some shopkeepers in the Poblenou neighborhood of Barcelona, Spain, have displayed signs at the entrance to their businesses with the words “No soy el chine de la esquina” (“I am not the Chinese on the corner”) and “No soy el paki” (“I am not Pakistani”).
This is a social inclusion campaign called “Tengo nombre” (“I have a name”) created by two students from the Brother Barcellona advertising communication school, Álex Porras and Laia Sánchez, to combat what they consider a problem of “micro-racism”: in fact, in Spain it is quite common to refer to shops and restaurants by citing exclusively the nationality of the owners.
It is a tradition also rooted in other European countries: in France, for example, the French word “arabe” is often used for shops managed by people of Maghrebi origins, while in Italy expressions such as “chinese” or “bangla” are used for indicate restaurants and businesses run by Chinese and Bangladeshi or, more generally, Asian people respectively.
Porras and Sánchez consider the normalization of these expressions a form of unconscious racism. They used them too: «I thought it wasn’t a big problem, but it is. You have to put yourself in other people’s shoes,” Sánchez said in an interview with the Spanish newspaper The newspaper. «We realized that expressions such as “shopping with a Pakistani” or “eating like a Chinese” are racist. We had never thought about it, but they put a person in a group and stigmatize them.”
The “Tengo nombre” campaign has acquired a certain visibility since December 2nd, when Sánchez and Porras opened the eponymous Instagram page. In the previous weeks they had convinced some shopkeepers in Poblenou to display the signs at the entrance to their businesses.
In a few days the page exceeded 8 thousand followers and the initiative has also spread outside Barcelona. For example, in an interview with Guardianthe president of the federation of Chinese workers in Spain, Johni Zhang, has said that the reaction of members has been “one hundred percent positive”, and that in recent weeks signs of this type have also been appearing in some shops in Madrid and Galicia.
The Instagram page also contains a link to a site where it is possible to download the campaign posters: initially they were written only in Spanish but in recent weeks, to accommodate the requests of some traders, versions have been created in Catalan, the other official language of the Barcelona region.