The foreing immigrants retail trade in Barcelona and the recomposition of "immigrant" as social category

Abstract

The foreign immigrants retail trade and their dinamizing effect on the most economically slumps of the Barcelona center has generated, grosso modo, a disparity between the opposed attitude of the autochthonous shopkeepers (and in certain sense, of the Administration, also) and the favorable attitude of the popular classes. For the autochthonous shopkeepers, the inmigrants retail trade arouse the ghost of devaluation because his double significance: "degrading" (as activity that pervert the environment) and "ethnic" (that evokes immigrant "communities/neighborhoods" that, in turn, they evoke marginality). On the other hand, the shopkeepers transform their foreign colleagues into scapegoat of the small traditional retail trade crisis. On the contrary, the popular classes have seen in great measure the immigrants retail trade as a revitalizang element of depressed neighborhoods. Usually, the popular classes stand (and built) the generic or archetypic immigrant as social subject through images of poverty, marginality and delinquency; but the public visibility of these shopkeepers supposes an anomaly for this preconceived image. Nevertheless, although the foreign shopkeepers contribute heterogeneity to the "immigrant" as social category, the homogeneity is recomposed through a series of discursive procedures.