Cenes de la Vega is an andalusian municipality with 7865 inhabitants, located in the south of Spain. The legal entity which rules the municipality is the City Council, and it is a legal Public Body who manages the territory a public subjects related.
As public body, Cenes has different responsibilities, well as representative of the executive power, well as their relevant player in the public live as ultimate responsible of a healthy society, from the perspective not only physical, but social.
Activities – specifically pertaining the project
Since Cenes de la Vega is a small town, with low social conflictivity, we work on the beliefs and feelings that are spreading across the internet, so they are the main focus of “infoxication” as primary source of disbeliefs and hate speeches for young people in the age in which the project is focused, from 12 to 18 years.
In order to achieve the main goals of the project:
- Raise awareness of the positive contribution of migrants to societies among young people in schools
- Challenge stereotypical views of migrants, particularly Muslims
- Increase awareness of cultural background and values of young migrants
- Discourage othering
- To overcome misunderstanding about migrants’ cultures, in particular about Muslims
- To empower young people as contributors
- To create tools to foster understanding of other cultures and multi-cultural views among young people
It is needed to adapt the tools that are defined in the project to the social reality of the South of Spain, and the preferences of the young people in the area.
We will use the music as a Troy Horse to achieve the mutual knowledge, collaboration and relationship between young immigrants and young locals, using the resource they are more familiar with, adapting the musical genres to the preferences of youngs in the South of Spain.
This is an important question, as Hip-hop and Rap were pretty well extended in France and other countries, but their impact in the south of Spain is smaller, where the fusions of differents musics have more presence.
The young people in the South of Spain listen very different music styles as Trap, Flamenco fusion (Rosalía), Reggaeton, Electronic, etc. Hip-hop and rap are perceived as “old” music and it has not impact in their day to day.
For this question, we planned use a total different style, Batucada, which is classic and novel at the same time, and is more based in the rhythm than in other cultural backgrounds, which facilitates the integration of people with different social and cultural backgrounds.
Some other reasons to prefer Batucada than rap or hip-hop are the advantages that offers:
- Batucada is more focused in the group, and hip-hop is more individualistic.
- Batucada is inclusive and “good wave”, hip-hop has a more defiant tone.
- Batucada teachers are easy to find, mean hip-hop teachers are harder to find in our area of Spain.
- Radio shows, putting the focus in the creation of podcast more than in live programs, because the technology and software are much more easy to use and adquire for a podcast, and it can be distribute across online and free platforms as iVoox or iTunes. In addition, podcast are permanent, and leave a footprint that endure across the time.
- Internet and social nets as main communication tool for the use of the younger ones, where they can reflect their collaboration, their lives, problem and hopes.
We need to clarify certains questions about how we understand some concepts we work with during the project:
- Area of influence: we considerer not only Cenes de la Vega, a small town, but the Metropolitan Area of Granada, where Cenes is included, as there is no physical separation between the different towns, in a urbanized area of more than 500.000 people.
- Migrant: is a cultural question, not an administrative statuts. Migrants will be considered as people living in the influence area with a cultural background of other cultures, well first hand, well inherited from their parents.
Our recruiting strategy will be working with the migrants associations in the area of influence, in order to have an interlocutor that easily the first contacts, and help for support to a local cultural association called PIDES, ‘Proyectos de Investigación para el Desarrollo Educativo y Social’, (Research Projects for the Social and Educational Development), an non-profit association with a strong experience in the use of music to empower and work with minorities and young ones. https://asociacionpides.wordpress.com/
The recruitment strategy for the young migrants is the key point of the project, as one of the hardest. We are aware that this task will be crucial, and for this we use the contacts of PIDES with local migrants association in order to facilitate the captation of youngs migrants for the project. We believe that the captantion of local will be much more easy, so we have received a very positive feedback of the youngs we have asked for.
About the place where hold the workshops, we use the Culture House, where a lot of different cultural classes are done.
The point of to adquiere the consents, the consents processes, it is a delicate one, considering it involves the youngs and their legal guardians. All the activities have to be very clearly explained to the parents and the youngs, in order to minimize the natural distrust about an activity that is looking for migrants. We rely in the previous history of PIDES working with migrants associations to facilitate this task.