TE20 Migrant Mosaics

Immigration: The Contest

what was once called Spain and had thereby reached the Spanish writer, in the same way that, in Africa, the story of Little Red Riding Hood was distorted, but that’s another story. The truth is that in those legends the innocent always seems guilty, and the Spanish writer’s story was no different; he presented Rodrigo as the powerful master of the palace, and the little boy had no business resisting a domination he couldn’t even understand; that feeling of guilt was accented when a relative of Little Red appeared, Juliánor Urbanoor Ulyan—nowmymemory is blurred—to save him fromcertain castration and take himback to his own people after slicing open Rodrigo’s belly with a knife. On the boat, surrounded by sobs to which I had grown immune, I remembered that, when the Spanish writer finished his story, I would feel again the sensation of listening to the tale of a boy who had been hoping to run into me to tell me about his life and hear about mine, and to discover that they had been almost identical, although, unlike Little Red, I was just the second of seven brothers, and I knew my family from the city that was once called Tétouan was not going to reclaim me because they were too busy looking for work for the firstborn and feeding the other five to worry about the escapades of the second son in Tangier with an expat Spanish writer.

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