ABSTRACT
At the beginning of 2008, Najat El Hachmi (Nador, Morocco, 1979) won the XXVIIIth Premi Ramon Llull, one of the most important literary awards in Catalan language, with her novel L’Últim Patriarca (‘The Last Patriarch’), about the life of a girl of Berber origin who immigrated to Catalonia. The media echoed the news widely, which was interpreted as a successful example of the so-called ‘Catalan model’ of integration through education, language and culture. Around that time, Catalan TV released a documentary on the Juvenile Prison of Barcelona, where there are a few hundred 18 to 25-year-old inmates, many of them immigrants from outside the EU, like one of the interviewees: a young Ecuadorian member of a Latino gang. The documentary made evident the failure regarding the reception of young immigrants, who are over-represented in prison and under-represented in universities. The cases of the young Catalan-Berber writer and the young Ecuadorian are two extreme examples of social inclusion and exclusion processes influencing the last generation of immigrants arriving in Catalonia. Both cases expose some traits of the migration, welcome and settlement processes that face those arriving in Barcelona and its metropolitan area as minors (sometimes due to their own decision, almost always due to their parents’ decision) and who have reached 18 (legally of age) in the host society. According to the beautiful words of the young writer, to become an adult between these two worlds is a peculiar challenge: ‘I was beginning to suspect that growing up was this, not being able to be who you had been in front of those who you had always known’, always being at the same time a kind of ‘translator’ between cultures and generations (El Hachmi 2008).
