On Guest-Editing The Spain Issue: María del Pilar Kaladeen and Marta Fernández Campa

We spoke to María del Pilar Kaladeen and Marta Fernández Campa about guest co-editing Wasafiri 126: Impossible Returns — The Spain Issue, which explores racialised and migrant existences in Spain that are intentionally overlooked in favour of more white, ethnonationalist narratives of the country. They discuss their deeply intentional process of putting the issue together, intersectionality, colonial and historical memory, editing at a time of catastrophe, and more. 

Why did you choose to edit this special issue of Wasafiri?  

María del Pilar Kaladeen: In Elena Bueriberi’s interview [for the issue] with the journalist Lucía Asúe Mbomío Rubío and the filmmaker Santiago Zannou, Lucía refers to this as a time that is fraught for her. The far right are increasing their political power in Spain, and this has a direct and sometimes violent impact on the daily lives of racialised Spaniards. Despite this, Lucía and Santiago are two of many creatives committed to representing the lives of Afro-Spaniards. Work of this quality, produced in an environment that can be hostile, should be seen by as wide an audience as possible. To me, to write at a time like this – particularly exquisite poetry like the work of Paloma Chen, Salma Bechar, and Karessa Malaya Ramos Aguiñot – whatever the subject, signifies your love for and your belief in the power of literature. It’s our privilege to be able to work with Wasafiri on this special issue and be a part of the process that allows these stories to travel to an English-reading audience.

Marta Fernández Campa: More than two and a half years have passed since María first approached me with the idea of co-editing the issue. This time has been heavily marked by the ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing in Palestine, the punitive censorship and gaslighting that any critique or opposition to it has been met with, and the solidifying of ICE and anti-immigration policies in the US and Europe. Art further unveils those interconnections. This is a time when art that reflects the societies people are forced to navigate and resist becomes even more vital. For example, Dantaé G Eliott’s essay on the work of artist Rubén H Bermúdez charts how the archive that he gathers through his photobook reflects and historicises – using photography, media, and historic documents – the Spanish systems of racial oppression. Bermúdez, as Eliott notes, disrupts these systems with his own family and personal archive of resistance.

The literature and art in this issue portray experiences and realities that do not often feature in Spain's (self-)imaginary and how it projects itself to the world. There are [already] anthologies published in Spain such as SOMOS: Relatos fronterizos, No existe sexo sin racialización, and Mujeres del Maíz: Antología de mujeres migrantes, that bring together writing by contemporary racialised and migrant writers and artists. I think the works in this issue contribute to that conversation. Editing this issue has been a privilege and an honour — particularly to do so with María, working alongside all the amazing artists and translators. 

The far right are increasing their political power in Spain, and this has a direct and sometimes violent impact on the daily lives of racialised Spaniards

What surprised you the most during the process of curating and producing this issue? 

MK: The willingness to be open and honest about things that are obviously quite painful. At a personal level, because my heritage is mixed and I grew up in a house of five racialised men, I was drawn to the articulacy with which the male contributors of dual heritage described their early lives and family histories. In Alejandro Lámbarry’s essay, there’s a part where he returns to his Basque grandfather’s village, which resonated with me. This anticipation of rejection, the sense that this journey is not the same for you as it might be for another who returns ‘home’, is something I have felt. I was surprised by the level at which I felt recognised. I grew up in the UK, but there were points where I was quite emotional during the editing process as I recalled my own experiences. Santiago Zannou, for example, referencing his closeness to his father, speaks about how this was in part generated by their shared experience of racism. There’s a section in the interview where he says, referencing his white mother, something like, ‘but there’s another who walked next to you’; I felt this quite powerfully because for me, growing up, there were certain things only our father could understand about our experiences. The way he speaks about how the impact of racism can distort a relationship as seemingly pure as that of a mother and child is really the first time I have heard anyone express, with such clarity, something that I have felt all my life.

Work of this quality ... should be seen by as wide an audience as possible

MFC: We were certain from the start that we didn’t want to prescribe or limit the focus of the contributors. We discussed the overall scope of the issue to offer a wider sense and idea [of the vision], but we mentioned that we were keen for them to write about what they chose to focus on. As the texts started to come in, there were common threads that offered a kind of dialogue and connection, some of which we anticipated because of previous conversations with authors and also because of [existing] interests and concerns in their work. But there was, of course, also surprise.

Language dwells and is understood in expansive as well as physical and figurative ways in the verses of Paloma Chen, Karessa Malaya Ramos Aguiñot, and Salma Bechar. Their poetry evokes the uprootedness of experiencing migration and its precarities; it becomes a weapon. And it also suggests the way in which one's own languages can instead, or also, become [a source of] refuge. 

I'm excited for readers to engage with the writing and artwork. The texts and art are really powerful. 

What kinds of conversations do you hope the issue will provoke in the UK and Spain?

MK: I really hope the work showcased in this issue gives an increased understanding of how much communities in the UK, with roots in countries that form part of the global majority, have in common with similar communities in Spain. One of the essays I adore in this issue is Layla Benitez-James’ article, which charts her responses to Spanish literature as a racialised woman who grew up in the United States and who now lives and works as a writer and translator in Spain. There were moments reading this piece when she made me think about how UK readers would be affected by the issue. When I consider, for example, ‘Waiting Room’, the short story by Safia El Aaddam, I think specifically of the way in which it gives voice to women in minoritised communities, who are at times compelled to become a sort of powerless protection force for the men in their families. As soon as I had finished it, I immediately wanted everyone to read it because it is an acute and painful expression of a known phenomenon, rendered with a level of intimacy that I found overwhelming. 

Also, Lucía Asué Mbomío Rubio and Santiago Zannou talk about a documentary they made together, inspired by Lucía’s book Las que se atrevieron (The Women who Dared). This book was based on stories of white women who had married Black men during the Francoist dictatorship in Spain. The two of them speak in the interview about how they expanded the documentary, with the help of the interviewer, journalist Elena Bueriberi, to include other parts of Europe where similar relationships had taken place post-World War II. For us in the UK, what they talk about will feel painfully familiar to the children of the Windrush Generation who either came from mixed marriages or went on to form one themselves. What I hope then is that post-Brexit, we can look to Europe and see that our experiences as racialised people who live and work in the UK are mirrored throughout Europe. We are not as isolated as we think we are, and because of what we’re all living through right now – a surge in the acceptability of far-right politics – that artistic kinship seems to come at a crucial time.

MFC: The issue reflects a plurality of perspectives, interests, and genres; hopefully, conversations emerging from engaging with them can also reflect that plurality. The interconnections present in the contributions that I mentioned earlier (and which most notably figure in the poetry section) reveal realities and thematic concerns that also characterise the literature of diasporic and migrant communities in the UK. I imagine that seeing both the similarities and various differences in both lived experiences and artistic expressions in Spain and the UK can nurture current and future conversations. 

Another hope is that the issue fosters further interest in – and that it might even lead to – more translation, contributing to a conversation about how impactful that would be to the arts ecosystems of both Spain and the UK. It would be amazing if one day there was an increase in the translation in English of racialised and migrant writers in Spain and of Spanish-speaking authors from the Caribbean and Latin America. And hopefully, the opposite would also take place in Spain, where translations of Black and other racialised writers are scarce. This issue has been made possible thanks to dedicated works of translation. 

In your issue Editorial, you write: ‘Espinoza Pino’s verse 'begin the impossible return' evokes the act of embarking on an unknown journey and a process of searching’ ... Does this reflect how you might have felt when working on the issue? What topics and perspectives did you want to foreground, or maybe avoid?    

MK: It’s certainly the case that this idea of return was multi-layered in this issue. When I was reading the essay by Noelia Cortés [in the issue], I thought about how she moves us to return to classic works of literature, to show us what she finds in those pages. For me, what she writes about Jane Eyre, a novel I have read and reread since childhood, made me want to pick it up yet again! There is, of course, the return that many here make to their childhood – to the experiences that shaped them – affecting the paths they chose creatively as adults. Alejandro Lámbarry describes his sister and then himself, making a literal return to their ancestral village in the Basque country, and in telling this personal, familial history he is able to tell us a wider story about the colonial past of Spain and Mexico so that the reader becomes a traveller through the time and space of this family line. But as many of the writers express here, if you are from a diasporic community, return is problematised by its impossibility. Mario [Espinoza Pino], the philosopher Carolina Meloni, and the novelist and journalist Gabriela Wiener all expound powerfully on this subject in the issue.

I hope the issue will contribute to an increase in the translation of racialised and migrant writers in Spain and of Spanish-speaking authors

MFC: In her conversation with Elena Bueriberi and Santiago Zannou, Lucia Asué Mbomio Rubio discusses how, despite a national denial of the impact of racism in the Spanish state, race – as a construct and tool of white supremacy – is very much a product of Spanish colonialism, as has also been discussed by the Pan-Africanist, Afro-Spanish scholar Antumi Toasijé. A similar discussion is also present in Espinoza Pino’s critique of the material and discursive violence of hispanidad in his life writing piece for the issue. We were keen to foreground some of these ideas, which we imagined authors would address, and which are important to understanding the history, experiences, and material conditions from which artists create. Yet simultaneously, what we wanted to avoid was an imposition on writers and artists to represent or articulate certain issues and realities. Mbomio Rubio speaks about that pressure and imposition on writers.  

As the texts started to come in, there were common threads 

It is telling, when it comes to the suppression of discussions on race and its legacy in Spain, that historical memory about the crimes of the Francoist regime, which is already fragile, rarely includes the country’s colonial memory, despite the intimate connections between the imperial drive behind Spain’s colonial history in Latin America and its fascist past. As Ale Oseguera points out in a news article, in Spain it is migrant communities that are carrying out a historical revision of the country’s colonial past, not Spanish intellectuals.

Alejandro Lámbarry’s life writing  reflects the scars of what Michel Rolph Trouillot articulates as 'silencing the past' (namely colonial past) in a moving piece where he details the ways in which the relationship with his Basque grandmother was mediated – and changed – by that legacy of silencing. 

In the Editorial, you refer to spaces such as Espacio Afro, Sudakasa, and Al’A-khawat collective. Some of these are physical spaces; others are figurative spaces of care, community, and mentorship. How do you see this issue offering and nurturing community for writers and artists from the region?

MK: I think that one thing that became clear during this issue – and it is particularly demonstrated in the essays by Dantaé Elliot and Layla Benitez James – is just how successful the writers and artists have been in forging communities in Spain and beyond — whether that has been in the development of spaces such as Espacio Afro, which the cover artist Rubén H Bermúdez and Lucía Asué Mbomío Rubio were both involved with, or the artistic community that the artist Sol Mussa has been nourished by through her move to the UK. I think every publication presents an opportunity to build community, and that’s very much what I desire for this issue. That said, I do feel that there are many successful renderings of what community means and how it offers succour within the pieces. There’s a short story by Lola Vargas called 'Warts' in the issue, which really brings home the intimacy and safety that community can offer. Yet it doesn’t stop there; I feel she also plays with an idea in that story, that there is a burden of history and community for children of migrants, things and people perhaps, that we are forced to carry with us. What does that mean for our own lives and bodies, she seems to ask; what is the physical impact of intergenerational trauma?

MFC: Wasafiri has been home to international writing for decades, becoming a key space for writers and also readers. It has fostered conversations across cultural spaces and connections among people, so it seemed like a perfect publication for a project like this to allow for that kind of dialogue. Some of the writers and artists in this issue know each other and have previously collaborated on projects. We wanted to represent within the space of this issue a gathering of both established and emerging artists. Lola Ortíz Vargas and Noelia Cortés share a publisher (en el mar editorial) for their novel Una loba en Santiago Rodriguez and non-fiction collection La higuera de las gitanas. So do Karessa Malaya Ramos Aguiñot and Salma Bechar, whose poetry books (Sitsiritsit and Agharas, which Bechar has co-authored with Sanae El Mokaddim) have been published with La Parceria Edita in their Lenguas Bífidas series. I hope this issue will offer yet another space of sharing and community among authors and with readers. 

Every publication presents an opportunity to build community

Several pieces in the issue touch on questions of female agency and the double bind of patriarchy, particularly for racialised women (writers and artists). Was engaging with intersectionality a conscious decision when curating the issue, or did it occur more organically, reflecting conversations taking place in the wider arts and sociopolitical landscape? 

MK: I think that this issue was very much led by the talent that was a part of it. For me, to have writers, artists, and translators of this calibre willing to work with us, I just wanted to get out of their way and see where they took us! That faith and willingness were rewarded by contributions that, when read together, tell us a fantastic story about what it means to be from the multi-nation of Spain in 2026. If you look at Paula Teixeira Molans’s interview with Sol Mussa as an example, there is a world in that piece. These two Galician women are speaking in a language that belongs to them, that is part of their cultural heritage, but that has become endangered — about art, race, identity, pornography, hierarchies, and trash, challenging unhelpful stereotypes about Galicia as a largely rural place culturally defined by out-migration. I do believe that if you bring the right people together, as an editor, your work is already half done.

MFC: It was both conscious and organic. Something that connects the texts in the issue is the notion of dissidence — the rejection of compliance that the philosopher Carolina Meloni writes about in La instancia subversiva: decir lo femenino, ¿es possible?, and which she identifies in genealogies of art and epistemology by racialised and migrant women. The writing in this issue both reflects and engages in dissidence, and that emerges organically while also reflecting current conversations in the sociopolitical landscape. Meloni also refers to a frontera del canon – a frontier of the canon – established by a Western, white, and male-centric philosophical tradition. The frontier becomes a space and practice that builds knowledge outside the canon that also exists in literary and cultural institutions, imposing which stories are privileged and by whom.  

I think it would be hard for anyone to read Noelia Cortés’s essay and not want to (re)read classics like Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, which she addresses while weaving in an intersectional feminist discussion that refigures gendered concepts like the rosebush and the reptile. The short stories by Safia El Aaddam and Lola Ortiz Vargas showcase relationships between women – estranged childhood friends and mother and daughter – as heavily impacted by their [gendered and migrant] experiences. The resistance of their characters, and their imposed roles as carers, are at the centre of the stories.  

As Meloni and Gabriela Wiener discuss in their conversation for this issue, feminism needs to be intersectional to be at odds with and confronting supremacist ideologies like Zionism or transphobic violence. In another featured conversation between Sol Mussa and Paula Teixeira – that they originally conducted in the galego language – both touch on the experience of migration. Galician Mozambican artist Sol Mussa lives and works in London, from where she reflects on how, through the tokenisation of racialised identity and 'female art', art institutions impose labels 'from a completely white perspective'.  

If you bring the right people together, as an editor, your work is already half done

Aside from this special issue, what further reading or other creative works across media would you recommend to audiences who want to hear further from migrant and racialised writers from Spain and other Spanish-speaking countries? 

MK: As someone who works specifically on cultural history in relation to the Caribbean, I have written a lot about texts where literature and history happen together, fiction that is consciously or unconsciously depicting a significant cultural moment and therefore also has historical value. I would love it if readers picked up some of the historical threads that were dropped in this issue. From Layla referencing Cervantes’s observation about the multiculturality of Sevilla, to Lucía urging people to consider how ridiculous it is – given Spain’s proximity to Africa – that this idea of a ‘white’ Spain still predominates. There is an important exhibition in A Coruña right now that maps the history of the port in relation to the city’s economic benefit from the trade in enslaved people that both Spain and the UK benefitted from between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Importantly, it also tells us that there were enslaved people living in A Coruña at this time. This history has been totally erased from the city. As individuals we have the power to ask publicly funded cultural institutions to represent history and the arts fairly and properly without prejudice. It would be wonderful if this issue meant that readers explored more diverse Spanish literature, but it’s also key that we as outsiders, visitors, and tourists trouble ourselves to push back against the history that we’re currently presented with. History and literature are inseparable; this is a point, to me, which lies at the heart of the feature essay by Layla Benitez James.

The writing in this issue both reflects and engages in dissidence

MFC: I would encourage people to read Layla Benítez-James’s essay, where she maps out the [Spanish] literary scene with a focus on Catalunya, where she lives. In a deeply insightful and personal essay, she discusses how writers like Desirée Bela-Lobedde, Lucía Asué Mbomio Rubio, and Safia El Aaddam have fostered a plural and nurturing community. She also lays out the key role of cooperative publishers and projects like Plataforma 0, JAŊDE Editorial, and others who publish in Spanish and Catalan. I highly recommend Masa vociferante (La massa vociferant) by Quinny Martínez Hernández, which is published by JAŊDE. Among many other things, the book offers an insight into what writing means for Martínez Hernández, whose decolonial work and initiatives promoting migrant writing in Spain have been massively impactful.

Martínez Hernández is also a journalist, and it is worth mentioning the strong relationship between anti-racist journalism and literary and artistic creation. Many of the writers who participate in this issue are journalists too. This is also the case for writers like Silvia Agüero Fernández, Sarah Babiker, Moha Gerehou, Ebbaba Hameda, and Youssef M Ouled. Equally, poetry is a genre that allows for the fluid exploration and challenging of imposed language and identity constraints. Gabriella Nuru’s Elegías de la mala raza, and Derecho de admisión by Yeison F García López are poetry collections that speak to this; it feels as if there is an underlying dialogue between their poems. Regarding the relationship between race and literature, I would also recommend the non-fiction book Literatura y raza by Helios (Ilyas) F Garcés, which dissects the racial hierarchies challenged (and also sometimes mantained) by literature, and Religión vs. Revolución: Malcolm X, musulmán de la liberación. The writing of Garcés, who is also a poet, equally engages in historical memory of the Spanish civil war and colonial memory. 

Poetry ... allows for the fluid exploration and challenging of imposed language and identity constraints

Aside from encouraging readers to check out works by the writers featured in the issue, there are fantastic contemporary authors whose works have been translated into English. For instance, this is the case of recent fiction by Daniela Catrileo and by Mónica Ojeda, in which they portray real, futuristic geographies in Abya Yala, where we can see the effects and violence of the machinery of racial capitalism at play. Another brilliant novel translated into English is Yuliana Ortiz Ruano’s Fiebre de carnaval (Carnaval Fever), which is reviewed by Victor Meadowcroft in the review section of the issue, edited by Farah Ali.

I also recommend checking out the titles curated and edited by Gabriela Wiener and published with Yegua de Troya.They reflect the ways in which literature by women from Abya Yala challenge form, genre, and the status quo through their narrative as, for example, in Dugongo by Mexican author Ale Oseguera (a former artist in residence at Sudakasa) — a hybrid fictional text that beautifully portrays a travel chronicle across South Asia via Barcelona. Please also check out the titles reviewed in the issue, including the poetry collection El Deber del Pan (Anthem of Evaporated Tears) by Xavier Válcarcel, reviewed by Alejandro Breas-Murillo and translated by the brilliant poet Roque Raquel Salas Rivera.