Resumen de Sub-Sahara African Immigrants in the ‘Land of Plenty’: Economic Crisis, Food Insecurity and Hunger in Tarragona and Lleida
With the economic crisis on the horizon, a growing part of the population in Spain has shifted (and continues to shift) from worrying about food quality – i.e. what they desire (as in when there was abundance), to worrying again about quantity – i.e. about access to food, access to sufficient amount of food at cheapest price possible, especially because abundant food and food availability in Spain does not translate into access for every individual and households in the country – especially access to the kind of food considered appropriate for health and wellbeing. This growing section of the population, an emerging category Schierup et al. (2015) called ‘the precariat’ (that is a social group, whose experience in the world of work is marked by ‘precarity’ in terms of informal labour, wage squeeze, temporariness, uncertainty, and pernicious risk), a social group with increasing difficulties to access food include immigrants, refugees, the unemployed, pensioners, the underemployed, the working poor, single parent families and so on. Thus, this study focus on Sub-Sahara African (SSA) immigrants living in Lleida and Tarragon, two cities in the Catalonia region of Spain, and emphasizes on the disproportionate and racial dimensions of precarization that is often neglected in research.
