ABSTRACT

On August 27, 2006, El País journal opened its Sunday Review with a striking photograph: a tourist on a beach on the Canary Islands was giving water to an African man covered with a beach towel. His eyes and countenance reected utter exhaustion, the weariness of a journey that had taken him from Africa to this outpost of Europe in the Atlantic. The photo captured an unusual encounter between Europe and Africa, between a tourist and a migrant. Las Tejitas Beach, the place where this act of hospitality took place, was transformed into an improvised camp-hospital where European tourists gave rst aid to dehydrated migrants while Red Cross personnel and the Spanish Civil Guard arrived on the scene. This snapshot of a contemporary

Good Samaritan clashed with the title of the article, “The Canaries, the Threatened Paradise,” for it automatically placed the emphasis not on the humanitarian crisis migrants represent, but on their threat to the Islands as a tourist destination. While the migrants were looking for hospitality, they found the hospitality industry, an industry jeopardized by their mere presence. The encounter between the migrant and the tourist dramatized the different meanings of mobility and border crossing in the age of globalization. It also foregrounded the haunting contrast between legal and “illegal” travelers, between paying and non-paying guests. These disparities, in fact, show the predicament of globalization, where “some of us enjoy the benets of easy connection and extensive mobility, while others are locked in place or coerced into motion by dire economic and political pressures” (Dikeç 2009, 2). Migrants and tourists met on the beach, but each group was inside its own psychological geography, the geography of beginnings and dreams versus that of holiday making, yet for a few hours, both groups shared the same space. The sharing does not dismantle the feeling that the tourists, of whatever nationality, stand for a sense of belonging as opposed to the migrants’ non-belonging. Even if tourists are hotel guests, they belong to a structured mobility of tour operators within a frame of legality. The migrants, in contrast, are nobody’s guests, and they are perceived as a threatening tide traversing the routes of illegality from Africa to Europe. They are hardly ever envisioned as individuals but as a generalized type (Friese 2004, 73), and are frequently narrativized within the frame of linguistic hostility as an uncontrollable ow. While the paying guests enjoy the pleasures and comforts of the hospitality industry, the migrants are the invisible guests that usually move through the Islands without being seen, other than on the news. Hospitality for them translates into internment in crowded detention centers, either on the Islands or on the mainland.