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. And it won't leave. 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, speaker, researcher, and writer 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?…
Notes:
The cited book is Yo, mujer migrante.
Quotes and references translated by the interviewer.
Images provided by the interviewee.