Black lives matter in Barcelona

Un­like the UK or USA, one of the more vis­i­ble ways that many Eu­ro­peans are used to see­ing black peo­ple is at work as street sell­ers, es­pe­cially dur­ing sum­mer in the big­ger cities. These are the so-called ‘top manta’ who dis­play their prod­ucts on blan­kets in busy places.

In July three years ago, Barcelona’s ‘top manta’ ven­dors – vir­tu­ally all of whom are of African de­scent – de­cided to set up their own web­site and cloth­ing brand. Their aim was to turn an il­le­gal ac­tiv­ity into a more widely ac­cepted one by “of­fi­cially reg­is­ter­ing as a non-profit or­gan­i­sa­tion/union.”

In a piece of good news, they re­cently fin­ished the first round of their crowd­fund­ing cam­paign to which al­most 2,500 peo­ple do­nated (mainly in amounts of less than 50 euros) to reach their ini­tial tar­get.

(This en­tre­pre­neur­ial move pre­dated the 2015 tragic death of a local man of Sene­galese ori­gin who fell from his third floor apart­ment bal­cony in Salou dur­ing a law en­force­ment raid. His fam­ily sued the po­lice.)

The union col­lec­tive says the busi­ness ven­ture is part of a broader goal to im­prove their liv­ing con­di­tions as mar­gin­alised peo­ple and be­cause they “want an al­ter­na­tive to the fake prod­ucts we dreamt we could take off the streets in our city.”

The as­so­ci­a­tion was formed by mi­grants from var­i­ous African coun­tries who have found a form of daily sub­sis­tence in street vend­ing. They argue that they want to have legal em­ploy­ment and res­i­dence sta­tus but that has been de­nied them.

Under the slo­gan “Sur­viv­ing is not a crime,” their col­lec­tive had been founded as “a way to sup­port [them­selves] in the face of the harsh­ness of sell­ing in the street every day and as a way to de­fend [them­selves] in the face of in­sti­tu­tional racism, per­se­cu­tion and crim­i­nal­i­sa­tion.” They are also keen to re­move the stigma around their jobs and em­pha­sise that they are “cre­ative in­di­vid­u­als with ideas and am­bi­tion, [just] like you.”

Some mem­bers have talked about the dig­nity of their work even though many earn an in­come that barely reaches 200 euros a month.

A re­cent Barcelona coun­cil in­ves­ti­ga­tion found that, con­trary to al­le­ga­tions, there was “no mafia” in­volve­ment in the sup­ply of prod­ucts to ’top manta’. It is be­lieved that there are or­gan­ised groups in­volved in the traf­fick­ing of peo­ple who bring these im­mi­grants to Spain and there are also “crim­i­nal bands” linked to coun­ter­feit goods.

Partly due to pres­sure from sev­eral mi­grant col­lec­tives, in 2010 street vend­ing was “de-pe­nalised” in Spain and it be­came a minor in­frac­tion. But again in 2015, a penal code re­form, car­ried out by the con­ser­v­a­tive gov­ern­ment of the Peo­ple’s Party (PP), reestab­lished street vend­ing as an of­fence with sanc­tions of be­tween six months and two years jail.

Legal sta­tus of ‘top man­tas’ aside, I am in­ter­ested that these men and their fam­i­lies have an in­come that al­lows them a de­cent life that keeps each of them away from se­ri­ous crime as a way of mak­ing ends meet fi­nan­cially.

Some other mem­bers of the pub­lic have ex­pressed frus­tra­tion that ‘top manta’ sell­ers take busi­ness away from es­tab­lished shops and busi­nesses, as well as the com­plaint that they pay no tax and are sell­ing goods man­u­fac­tured by chil­dren in ex­treme poverty.

These strike me as prob­a­bly valid points that need to be worked out, but on a Eu­ro­pean-wide basis rather than a na­tional or local one. Over­all though, we face the prob­lem of what should (and can) be done when peo­ple are trapped in the kind of sit­u­a­tion the ‘top man­tas’ are.

Every­one has the basic right to a de­cent liv­ing. How gov­ern­ments and so­ci­ety deal with this is a huge ques­tion that tests how hu­mane we re­ally are.