As I venture more into this subject, so many ideas and ways to approach my research come to my mind. How "would I do it a lot more interesting?" I asked to myself the other day. Now I feel the subject itself is very interesting and worth to research as much as possible.
I've been getting valuable information from the Secretaria de Trabajo e Inmigracion. Which have a tremendous amount of mostly updated information about certain collectives (eg. Ecuadorians, Peruvians, Colombians, etc)
As I talked to a person who is very knowledgeable in this subject matter, she made me realize that I should focus on a specific group, I chose Peruvians, Colombians and Ecuadorians.As far as now, I've been interviewing Colombians and Peruvians, however the biggest Immigrant collective are the ones from Ecuador. This is the one I feel more interested to explore. Based on the economic situation they were going through back in Ecuador, one can deduced the reason they migrated.
The other day I met a lady from Ecuador, she was very nice and easy to talk to. She has seven kids, all of them here in Spain. They all work, but mostly is her husband and herself who bring the income to support the nine of them, She sells clothing on street fairs. She says before the business was really good but now the crisis has hurt them somehow. However, they go to other countries to sell and make the best out of the situation they are going through at this moment.
I asked her if she was happy, she took a long pause and said yes, because she has the means to give stability to her family, something back in Ecuador was not possible. She wishes to go back, she wants to earn and save more money and then go back.
Mostly all immigrants come with that in mind. The reasons they came to Spain is because there was a great demand of workforce and a good pay. Everyone was sold y that and migrated to make a better living for themselves and their families back home.
At some point either immigrants become part of the Spanish culture by learning its customs, culture, history, etc or they just go back to start again in the countries where they were born.
The other day, I went to an exhibition called Post it, and it was about ways people occupy public space for an unspecific period of time. This was absolutely interesting and another way I could approach my research. They way immigrants start to make a place their own, and this would be more visible in neighborhoods with a high concentration of Latin Americans.
I highly recommend this exhibition, it is located on Palacio de Cibeles on the 4th floor.
The project is starting to grow and I feel happy but at the same time I feel I need to challenge myself a lot more so I can achieve even better results.
