Alternative Communities in Lavapiés: (Dis)Encounters between Spain and Cuba
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Abstract
The district of Lavapiés in Madrid has become a multiethnic topography in which transnational migrations and intercultural encounters are promoted. This locality symbolises the centre of multiculturalism in the city, because between 1991 and 2006 its foreign population increased from 4.90% to 35.16% (Barañano et al. 2006, 61). Thus, Lavapiés exemplifies an economic, cultural, and political convergence of Spaniards and immigrants that can be understood as a synecdoche for the global movements that characterise our contemporary society. Indeed, alternative communities from different nationalities coexist in this urban space, configuring a hybrid mosaic of people and places that renegotiate sociocultural relations and interethnic dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. The inhabitants of Lavapiés distance themselves from the boundaries that originated in the underlying preconceptions of an exclusively homogeneous national paradigm, and instead open up spaces for multicultural transformations.