Patchwork Coat: Interview with Zinthia Palomino

I begin this piece with a modern approach: 

migrant interview Black author feminist

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Latin America Spain stereotypes literature

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Zinthia Álvarez Palomino and I connected through a video call on Meet. The director of Afroféminas referred her to me in response to my questions about migration and Blackness in Spain, concluding her email with, "No one better than her for this interview."

It’s a cold weekday morning. I’ve seen a photo of her on Wikipedia, but when she connects to the call, suddenly, she’s human to me. I notice the fingerprint smudges on my screen, a small work of art—grime over light, a smudge of grease amid the gestures of spoken words. Zinthia wears green-rimmed glasses and is dressed in black. It’s raining in Galicia, where she is. It is the beginning of a winter that started quietly and has been stretching with the storm. In Barcelona, where I am, the drought persists. However, it won't be leaving many areas. Just a few days ago, the Trump administration considered launching a campaign claiming that global warming has been beneficial to humanity. Writing that makes my stomach ache—for Trump and his tasteless propaganda, for Wall Street’s corrections, for life, for the lives lost in Gaza, and for being forced to recall the Ahnenerbe in this manner.

Zinthia is a journalist, activist researcher, writer, and speaker who sometimes speaks of herself in the third person, almost as if she were talking about something that happened in a dream or about the adventures of a character in a book. She was born in Maracaibo, Venezuela, and migrated to Spain, where she currently resides (adverbs that say nothing). She has a specific background in social integration, community intercultural mediation, and international migration. She is one of the co-founders of Afrogalegas and has collaborated with media outlets such as Píkara Magazine, Canal Red, El Salto, and, of course, Afroféminas. There are easy paths between her and me, so effortless that they feel as though they’ve already been made and already traveled. We have always been both close and distant, a realization that strikes me when I listen to her. Bogotá and Maracaibo, Barcelona and A Coruña feel just a block away.

How do I describe her? As a woman defined by migration, Blackness, and womanhood? Or as the point where all those identities converge, where migration takes on the hue of Blackness?

The gaze of others distorts one’s self-image, and this distortion intensifies when migrating from the Global South to the Global North. Existential characteristics—such as being a migrant—are perceived, through the eyes of those who see themselves as superior, as deficiencies. Their gaze assigns labels to these so-called “deficiencies”: to being a woman, a migrant, Black, or Latina, it adds “promiscuous, poor, and ignorant.”

I wrote these words in my notebook in capital letters to avoid confusing them with my own thoughts, placing them in quotation marks so I wouldn’t forget they belonged to someone else. Despite that, even though these words belong to her, I can’t help but feel like the reader who finds in them words for her own existence. "Dirty," "dumb," "gold digger." Migrant and non-white women are pressured to "distance themselves" from the imposed identity. Are you who they say you are?

"When you migrate, they give you new labels, but you don’t choose them." In Hospitalet de Llobregat, a cleaning company’s advertisement features a Black woman in gloves and a neat pale blue uniform. We believe what we see; we create what we imagine. Migration is an identity imbalance—a loss, a confusion, a confrontation, a revelation, a construction, and a search.

Racism is rampant. It’s understood. The derogatory image others have of Latin American and Afro-migrant women is also well understood. We know Latin American women must prove their worth by doing work that their white peers wouldn’t have to. Prove they’re not stupid. Prove they’re not promiscuous. Prove they are exceptional, and save lives. Perhaps that’s the story of Black women everywhere: do we have the right to be ordinary? (And do we have the right to be promiscuous?)

Yet, to be able to narrate one’s own story is a privilege. Many cannot do this; they are reduced to statistics or secondary characters in someone else’s narrative. Often, the priorities of vulnerability take precedence. Before telling one’s own story, one must create it—find the bread that sustains and the roof that shelters. Still, we all, to varying degrees, work to dismantle the Spanish stereotypes imposed on us. “Malí se ha convertido en el principal país de origen de la emigración irregular africana hacia España” (Mali has become the leading country of origin for irregular African migration to Spain) an RTVE article states. "The irregular Africans" (which is another way of saying "those people") arrive by boat on the Canary Islands, fleeing conflict. "Those people" embody each individual within them—the one who leaves behind and abandons, the one armed with few words, filled with desire, and laden with longing. Some cross the sea for love; others cross it for hunger.

This is also one aspect of racism. While some activists focus directly on combating systemic racism, there are Afro and migrant women who contribute in other ways and other areas— climate change, exercise, poetry, and mushroom cultivation.  But this, too, is part of the mechanism of racism. Zinthia’s work underscores this truth. As an anti-racist activist, she not only speaks about racism but also highlights the contributions of Afro-women who may not directly address racism—and that, in itself, is a form of anti-racist activism.

“It’s been assumed that Black women haven’t changed the world,” Zinthia says during our interview. “Nor have they contributed to science, philosophy, or politics.” Black people are seen as mere receptacles of others' accomplishments, cleaners of waste, polishers of whiteness, icons of racial struggle.  From the project Mujeres negras que cambiaron el mundo (Black Women Who Changed the World) have emerged two children’s books aimed at dismantling this belief—an absurd yet painfully ingrained idea in the collective unconscious. In Mujeres negras en la ciencia (Black Women in Science) and Mujeres negras en la filosofía (Black Women in Philosophy), Palomino brings visibility to the work of so many women, playing by the same rules as potential critics, using the very metrics white and male individuals use to pat themselves on the back and measure their own achievements. So they can’t say, "Ah, this woman doesn't follow the scientific method," or "Ah, this woman writes fairy tales, not philosophy." The potential detractors often hide behind the Western model as the only valid way to create knowledge, using it to justify their racist beliefs, dressing them up as critical thinking, solid reasoning, or exhaustive rigor.

It’s not that Black women’s contributions are invisible; society enjoys the advances they’ve made. It’s not that migrant women aren’t visible. (Just follow the rules, dress like us, and don’t make too much noise. If we see you, we forget you. And if you speak to us, we claim not to understand, because you speak a variant of Spanish we don’t recognize.) What is left unsaid or overlooked also counts.

On September 12, 1992, Mae Jemison became the first Afro-descendant woman to travel to space aboard the Endeavour space shuttle. The first person in space flew aboard Vostok 1 on April 12, 1961. What do these dates tell us? Why do we know, without question, that the first person aboard Vostok 1 was a white man? And why is Jemison’s achievement so significant?

I often encounter the Black man who works out at the same time as I do at the gym. He spends a lot of time warming up—a practice I should probably adopt. He’s muscular but slim, almost small. I’ve long known that it’s racist to assume Black people naturally have more muscle or build muscle faster than white people. But one ordinary morning, I have a realization: such beliefs stem from the false notion that Black and white people are biologically distinct races—a belief that fuels another, equally sinister idea: that Black people possess an “animalistic” quality. We write about racism often, not because it's an "inexhaustible source," but because it is the system that shapes our thoughts and actions. What we think and how we act are made from the very fibers of racism. It will stop being an "inexhaustible source" when we change the structure itself. Racism has spread and solidified over centuries, and it won’t be undone with just a few books, marches, or conferences. But that doesn’t mean the fight is futile— avoidable.

Talking with others teaches us much. I initially thought migration was an important topic to explore because I am a migrant myself. Perhaps I wanted to be understood. Through this process, I’ve learned something else, something I hope I’ve written down. I’ve noted in my notebook “wrapped in animal coats that weren’t mine.” A peculiar taste lingers in my mouth: the sweetness of mamoncillos and the salt of sweat dripping from the corner of my mouth—sweat from a body that’s mine, but from another time and place. Zinthia’s metaphor for her experience sheds light on how we can understand the migration of a woman: to be is also to seem cold, to be is what covers you. Perhaps the good life lies in shedding the coat someone else draped over you to keep you from feeling a cold you haven’t felt. Where does that icy wind come from?

In her book Yo, mujer migrante, (I, Migrant Woman) Zinthia explores the metaphor of these coats—in the interview, she reveals this as the fleeting flash of a firefly, yet in the book, the coats become tangible. When she moved from Venezuela to Spain, she packed three suitcases of summer clothes meant for Maracaibo’s “humid heat, with temperatures reaching 40 degrees [104 Fahrenheit].” But in her first two years in Galicia, she could use little of what she brought. She splurged on Spanish fast fashion—clothes that didn’t match what she already had: “In the first months, I wore layers upon layers... I felt like a hawk stuffed into colorful coats and cheap boots, imitating the skin of some animal. Seeing photos from that time, I can pinpoint that internal sensation I had when I walked outside” (148).

I’m struck by the moving story at the end of the book, where her best friend’s move to Galicia gave her a renewed sense of agency. The migrant must become herself again, piece herself back together, and the relationships she forms raise the question of who she truly is. A beloved person who knows us well enough to ask about our family by their proper names helps us see our identity over time, much more human and complex than the one defined by the turning point of arriving in a new place, burdened with clothes that no longer fit our body or our life.

At the end of our interview, Zinthia talks about how she will celebrate Christmas and once again underscores the importance of affection. Who takes care of us when we fall ill in a foreign land? Who do we turn to when sadness overwhelms us, when life feels like it’s unraveling? Zinthia, her image blurred on the screen, covered with my fingerprints, tells me she feels grateful to know how loved and embraced she is in the place where she has built a network of support—one that doesn’t trap her like a fishing net, but acts as a lifeline. Affection, the safety net that keeps us from falling, is also a neural network that allows us to think, feel, and speak. Then, she shares something I’ve long known in my heart: how wonderful it would be to return to Maracaibo on December 24, to savor the bubbles of a cold beer, to stretch out a hand and find a mother’s hand. How sweet it would be to feel the sweat run across the forehead and settle in the eyebrows. “Migrants are destined to yearn for omnipresence,” I tell her, because this is how I’ve come to understand the perpetual nostalgia that follows a life of migration. We are broken, and we will always be broken—but that isn’t inherently bad. Before the journey, a part of us departs; and when we’re at home, we are ghosts in another.

Today in Maracaibo, the temperature is 31°C, with 56% humidity and winds at 8 km per hour. In Maracaibo, Latinas are not Latinas. I don’t know if you understand.

Months after our first video call, I meet Zinthia in person when she comes to Barcelona to present Mujeres negras en la ciencia at Amora Libros, a small bookstore in Gracia. When we greet, we hug as though we’ve been comrades in a long-lost youth partisan movement. In her presentation, Zinthia reminds us that this view of migration, women, and Blackness is ancient. The struggle isn’t small—it’s about dismantling a way of being that has seemed correct and singular for centuries.

And we don’t just distance ourselves from imposed stereotypes and the stories told by supposed victors. We take the next step. We’re not asking others to accept us. Zinthia tells me, “We don’t need their acceptance to be who we are.” Neither their acceptance nor their permission.

But perhaps what we do need is protection, a place to rest. The fight is long and relentless. "Unavoidable." "Honorable." "The mother’s house is the refuge, the place you run to with closed eyes when everything else seems to collapse, the safe place you return to when dreams don’t turn out as expected" (149). We are made of scraps of stories, people, and territories that we can use to weave a skin that serves as a refuge, “a skin to hold me, to thank the universe and to thank myself.” To thank ourselves for the extraordinary and the everyday. For the commendable. For what touches us, heals us, and goes with the breeze.

Notes:

Lina M. Sánchez BetancourtComment