<![CDATA[Ara Balears in English - integration]]> 10 <![CDATA[Speculators should not be integrated]]>

In any town or city in the Balearic Islands, you can see how a large portion of the new construction is the work of a foreign developer. German, Swedish, and English families fill the construction signs, except for apartment blocks. We see it in coastal towns, with villas that will sell for at least five million euros, but also in traditional neighborhoods. In the Terreno de Palma area, there are about ten projects that consist of taking a traditional house, part of the urban landscape, with its roof and shutters, and turning it into an eyesore as large as the regulations allow. These speculators are known as investors. People who buy properties taking advantage of the insatiable demand from northern countries and sell them for five or ten times the price. This keeps happening in the name of the free movement of goods and people within the European Union. The trickle of dispossession doesn't stop.

]]> <![CDATA[The Sufis of Sa Pobla. "A discreet presence"]]> At dawn, the first shadows fall on the train station plaza. They are cold and sleepy, their faces show it, their steps are slow. They look for a pebble to sit on or, standing straight ahead, they wait. To the left, the Amazigh of the Rift Valley; to the right, the people from Senegal. They all hope to find work in Marjal or in a garden by the bay. To work for a few coins they will shake with hands weathered by the desert.What time?The sound of a voice can be heard from further away. To avoid fights over a crust of bread, they divided up the space. Those who come to the plaza are almost always the newest arrivals. They don't speak, they don't understand; they say yes to almost everything, they don't complain. They have a gleam in their eyes, their hearts beat with anticipation of their uncertain future, while silently they think of their families, those they left behind at their parents' house.

]]> <![CDATA["I don't feel any less Moroccan for celebrating Saint Anthony"]]>

Nordin, a 24-year-old Moroccan, arrived in Sa Pobla almost three months before Sant Antoni in 2007. On January 16th, he wasn't yet in school, and his parents told him not to go out too much because he didn't know anyone in town. However, for the Sant Antoni festival, he went to the main square and saw "caparrots, devils, and a huge crowd," he recalls. The following year, he was already playing at stealing the devils' brooms and running off without fear. Since then, he has felt part of the festival and celebrates it year after year.

]]> <![CDATA[The names of our hope]]> "Thank you very much for showing interest in women's football.". CE Manacor recently appointed a new women's football coordinator. Due to my work as an intrepid reporter, I became interested in this new position within the club's infrastructure. Alicia, the new coordinator, received our message and contacted us. In Spanish. I returned her reply, via WhatsApp, in Catalan. And all with spelling mistakes, and we agreed on a telephone interview. Hearing her voice and looking at her lineage, I asked her: "Weren't you a student of mine?" "Are you a Toni?" Spanish speaker. She was a student of ours, a good handful of years ago, at the IES Portocristo. I thought... "Whew, Toni, how are you going to do around here?" the waiter attacked me. Shorts, white shirt, trousers with pleats in dress and manner, in service and speech.

]]> <![CDATA[The fears]]> One of the most recurrent ideas of the European far right is that immigration has as its goal or more or less desired effect the consummation of a certain demographic replacement, which would lead us to a supposed Islamization of Europe. Needless to say, this right draws on the rhetoric and fears of an old Anglo-Saxon right, but also on certain populist slogans that fueled, among other horrible things, Nazism. Because that's what was called "de-Jewishness." This same right that fears demographic replacement, however, uses demography and internal immigration to erase the state's other languages.

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