Every day on my way out of the house, no matter what time of day it was, I passed either a man or a woman in a grey uniform shirt outside my host mother’s building. They stood by the cars parked along the side of the street, hands folded in front or behind them, monitoring everyone driving by with an almost inordinately vigilant gaze, like they might only have moments to react—to whatever it was that was coming for them down the street. My roommates and I never interacted with them. When we first started leaving the apartment at the beginning of the semester we would all smile in their direction, still a little too nervous with our levels of Spanish to say something—lest we accidentally start a conversation that we couldn’t handle—but we never even received a nod in return, so after a while, the smiles and nods stopped and all four of us simply integrated them into our daily walk as something to pass on the way to school or the rest of the city. It wasn’t that we were trying to be rude, or even thought that they were trying to be rude to us. We were in a foreign country and nearly everything had subtle differences to it. Assuming that the “street monitors” were upset with us—the American exchange students that would really only be there for a couple of months—was silly, and to be honest we were all too overwhelmed with the rest of Spain to even care if they were upset with us, for whatever reason that may be.

About a month into the semester, when we’d run out of things to say one night at the dinner table, one of my roommates suddenly asked who the people in the grey shirts along the street were. Imagine our surprise when my host mom’s upper lip curled back almost in disgust as she scoffed, “gitanos.” My host mom’s racism wasn’t much of a surprise, to be honest. She openly spoke about “los chinos”—the people and the stores around the city that were generalized for selling cheaper, but not as high-quality, clothing and other odds and ends—and how antisocial and unaccepting they were for living in this country. In the back of my mind, I always wondered how much of their “antisocial” behavior was merited by outward racism that I’m sure they experienced on a daily basis, but I never asked about it and I never pretended to know enough about the history of race in Spain to really have an opinion about the subject. Now, however, I did understand why we had never received a smile or a nod back from any of the people working the streets. My guess was—and rightly so—that these people experienced a lot of racism and probably felt no obligation to be nice to us, and I could hardly blame them.

My host mom went on to say that there were people hired to watch the parking areas and help people into their designated spots and keep people without permits from parking there, but after they left and the street was vacant for almost the entirety of the day, the Roma took their place and acted as the parking assistants. I couldn’t really see what the problem was. If people were feeling generous, maybe they’d tip them, and if they weren’t, then they didn’t. It seemed the same sort of relationship as in the US, where you might get approached by someone trying to shine shoes or wash your windshield, but ultimately everyone went about their own lives. Not so, according to my host mom. The dynamic was much more hostile in this part of the world that I was in. People trying to park midday would fly onto the street and rush to park as fast as they could, while the Roma—who had been watching for them this whole time—would sprint towards the car to try and get their and assist with the parking so that they could demand a tip. If the driver didn’t tip them, my host mom told us, it was likely that when you returned to your car there would be some sort of damage and no way to prove who had done it. The relationship between these two groups living so close together left me shocked—none of my roommates knew what to say in return either, and my host mom just kind of shrugged sadly and moved on to ask us about our travel plans for Semana Santa were.

I think most of my shock at her vocalization of her distaste came from the rest of her involvement around the community. My host mom wasn’t married and had no kids; the students that she housed were her business, so aside from cooking and running a household for us, she had a decent amount of free time on her hands, and a lot of that she devoted to community and charity work. The soup kitchen was her favorite place to volunteer. Every Sunday—and often a couple more times during the week if she could fit it in—she would spend three to four hours at the soup kitchen in Sevilla serving food to the homeless and less fortunate of the community, and yet, when it came to the Roma standing outside her door, she wanted nothing to do with them—as did most other Spaniards that I met while living there. Because the Roma had difficulty finding jobs and often lived very low-income lives, they worked where they could, like on the streets as parking assistants where they hadn’t been asked to be, and if they couldn’t make enough money, they pushed even harder for tips and were much more forward to the Spaniards there. I’m not sure of the statistics, but my host mom had also mentioned that a lot of crime in the city—burglaries, vandalized houses and cars, stolen bikes that had been left outside even with locks (I rented a bike once for the day and was told very clearly to never let it out of my sight, because it would be gone in a second if I did)—was found to be perpetrated by the gypsies. They needed the money, and even though they were going about getting it in illegal ways, the Roma were still trying to work, even in a society that really didn’t want them there and had no problem telling them so.

In Michelle Madsen Camacho’s “Power and Privilege: Community Service Learning in Tijuana,” she talks about the power dynamic of philanthropy and community service. Her point about reciprocity was interesting, that without some sort of exchange—some give and take for both the “giving” and the “receiving” parties—all philanthropy does is create a morally legitimatized reason for the power balance between groups and classes in society. In philanthropy, according to this idea, the receiving group has been selected as “needy” by the better off, and even more entitled, group, removing all possibility of reflexivity. This responsibility that the better off group has to the “Other” comes with a sense of superiority, and even though there was clearly more than just a power struggle behind the poor relations the Spaniards had with the Roma, after reading Camacho’s work, I began to see that my host mom seemed to like that the “needy” accepted her help—giving her this feeling of empowerment and superiority—and not those that were less well-off but still trying to make their way in the world. This power dynamic was clear in the way that she talked about the Moroccans working the streets as well. Unlike the Roma, who pushed their way into the Spaniards’ days to make money, the Moroccans set up shop—legally and illegally—on the sides of the streets selling goods to passersby. By appealing to the people on the street, essentially putting the patrons in the position of power and superiority, despite the fact that much of what they were doing was still illegal, the Moroccans had created a niche in the power dynamic that didn’t leave them scorned by the rest of society. What I found most interesting about this was my host mom’s reaction to them is the way that she talked about the histories of these two groups of people—one that had only recently begun to immigrate to Spain with larger numbers and one that had been here for centuries. The Moroccans were sad and hungry people that needed help. They came to Spain from impoverished homes and risked everything to make a better life for themselves, even though it might have meant that they would end up in jail for the distribution of drugs and other illegal goods. To the Roma, on the other hand, despite having been a large part of the Spanish culture for many, many centuries, she acted as if they didn’t belong in the country and that no one would mind if they all suddenly decided to pack up and leave—and to be honest, I think a good portion of the Spaniards in Sevilla were more or less in agreement.

It is sad to see how apparent this power struggle was, and while I don’t agree with everything that Camacho said about community service and philanthropy, I have to agree with her on her views of reciprocity. Without living an experience, like being the “Other,” for a sustained amount of time, it really is impossible to place yourself in the position of judging how others work to make their way in the world. In some sense, without living an experience, you will always be a tourist because you can leave and go back to your comfortable and safe place in the world. I cannot every hope to understand the class struggles behind Spain’s society, but as someone coming in from the outside—essentially making myself a different variant of an “Other” to the Spaniards, I feel that I was in an unbiased enough situation to be able to look at the power dynamic with open eyes and just take in what I could see, without any bitterness or history of my own with any of these people, and I can say that it makes me very sad power dynamics as toxic as this still persist as strongly as they do. Being in Spain, even in a position of privilege, has made me look at even the Holyoke Bound experience differently, humbling me and making me realize just how little I can understand about the experiences of the “needy” and the “Other,” and I hope that I can help others in privilege see just how little it is that we understand about their experiences. I think that first step is often overlooked and incredibly important to trying to breech the gap between the groups and classes we have in our world.