Graciela Blandon /
Asociación Pro Derechos Humanos de Andalucía (APDHA) /
Cadiz, Spain /
Four years ago, four bodies were recovered off the coast of Cadiz, a small island on Spain’s southern border. The bodies belonged to North African migrants seeking asylum in Europe. The port city of Cadiz has a long history of transnational movement as one of the oldest inhabited European cities, serving as Christopher Columbus’s preferred point of departure in the sixteenth century and as an arrival hub for more than 1,500 African migrants and refugees in 2018.
Ill-equipped to deal with migratory influxes, the state deferred responsibility for those arriving in Cadiz to either police or local humanitarian organizations. The Cadiz delegation of the Asociación Pro Derechos Humanos de Andalucía (APDHA) has been at the forefront of the “crisis” while managing a varied portfolio of intersecting human rights advocacy work. This summer, I will be interning with the APDHA as a Gallatin Global Fellow in Human Rights and as a fellow borderlander native to El Paso, Texas.
The APDHA was founded on the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and operates with four tenets. The first is awareness of citizenship. Through community-based pedagogy, the APDHA strives to train citizens in the values of a human rights framework. The second is social reporting, wherein the collective identifies human rights violations and strategizes ways to apply political pressure through the third tenet: elaboration of alternatives. Finally, the APDHA provides support and solidarity for those suffering the subversion of their rights.
For three months, I will assist with the APDHA’s organizing efforts. Among my tasks will be constructing project proposals, managing working groups, writing communiques, and updating the website’s content and digital assets in English and Spanish. I’m especially excited to aid in the creation and distribution of the APDHA’s annual report on the state of human rights on the southern border of Spain. Through that project, which is currently being crowdfunded, the organization intends to analyze the evolution of migratory fluxes and the consequences of political changes on the lives and rights of migrants, expose systemic vulnerabilities in the human rights framework, and denounce the entrepreneurial dimension of the border. The report is referred to by national and international media, institutions, and research organizations.
At the same time, I will be embarking on my own intellectual quest, if you will, by interrogating the positionality of the APDHA’s approach to advocacy via their foundational tenets. I’m particularly interested in how the APDHA’s work upholds or rejects state-making projects and normative assumptions about human rights while negotiating community-based organizing with its status as a region-wide NGO. I will ask questions such as the following:
- How do border populaces define their own sovereignty?
- What is the role of human rights organizations in integrating the migrant as one of the first points of contact?
- What identities are created or destroyed due to living in a peripheral community, and how are they affected by national identity, Europeanisation, and the idea of citizenship?
I hope that this work will yield insights into the efficacy of the APDHA’s organizing strategies, theories of political mass participation, and relationships to relevant institutions.