Girona has become a small Honduras. The number of Honduran residents has more than doubled in the last decade and it is the foreign group that adds the most new registrations to the register. So much so that the politicians of the Central American country are already talking about Girona as the 19th district of Honduras.
The city's link with the Honduran community is by no means recent. The first pages were written in 1976, when the now septuagenarian Rosa María Álvarez, with other friends, went to work in homes in the city. "Necessity gripped me, I came from a very poor family and I hardly had the opportunity to go to school; at the age of eight I started working in a shop, in a tobacconist, in houses and my last job there was in a McDonald's", explains the woman, who hopes to be able to return to her native country to spend the last years there of life At the age of 24, he received an offer to go to work doing housework for a woman from Girona.
He came for two years and has been here for 47 years, during which time he has raised a family and has not stopped working. "Until I retired, I never lacked work," says the woman, a native of Talanga, about 50 kilometers from the country's capital, Tegucigalpa. The majority of Honduran women settled in Girona come precisely from this city. Word of mouth, as in many migratory processes, has been decisive.
"Eight years after arriving in Girona, a woman opened an agency for domestic workers and contacted one of my friends who had emigrated with me: she was looking for candidates in Honduras, and that's how some they told the others, and they told others, and a chain was created that has reached today", he explains.
In November there were more than 7,300 Hondurans registered in the city. Graduate in Pedagogy Mariela Sandres, a victim of gender-based violence in her country, arrived four and a half years ago, encouraged by the family and friendship network she already had in Catalonia. After some time in Barcelona, she worked caring for children, the elderly and people with disabilities. He now works at the Honduran consulate in Barcelona, but maintains his home in Girona.
"All migratory phenomena begin with a network of trust and the case of Girona", states the professor of Political Science at the UdG, Salvador Martí, who affirms that Girona is the city in Spain "with the highest presence of Hondurans per kilometer square". Since 2010, the number of citizens of this country registered in the city has increased by 140%, and since 2012 it has been the majority foreign group in the city, ahead of Moroccans. More than two-thirds are women, and tasks linked to the care of the home and the elderly are the main modus vivendi of the group. Among men, many work in industry, mainly in the meat sector, and in transport. The neighborhoods Eixample Sud (25%), Eixample Nord (20%), Santa Eugènia (19.8%) and Can Gibert (11%) concentrate the largest part of the group, according to data provided by Girona City Council .
This immigration, which mostly arrived in the late 1990s and early 2000s, was initially quite invisible. "Much of the population did not realize that there were Hondurans in the city until ten years later. This happened because it was a very feminized, silent group, which spent a large part of its time at home, doing domestic tasks or caring for the elderly, and had little demand for public services. They start to become visible when the children arrive at school", explains Martí, who estimates that in the metropolitan area of Girona, adding neighboring counties such as Pla de l'Estany and La Selva, the number of Hondurans approaches to 20,000. In the entire province, according to the latest data obtained three years ago by the Association of Cooperation and Economic Development of the Honduran Community in Girona (Acodehgi), it would reach around 34,000, a figure that doubles that which appears in the INE . "These data do not include, for example, those who are not registered or who have dual nationality and who are also recorded as Spanish", says the president of the entity, Alex Arita, who emigrated 16 years ago because of gangs , the gangs of young criminals who extorted him. "They forced me to leave, my life was in danger", he explains. “Honduras lived in a narco-dictatorship for 12 years, debt soared to 800%, poverty to 76% of which more than half suffered extreme poverty. This, added to the maras, made Honduras the most violent country without being at war", he says. Today, of the eight million inhabitants, two million are abroad and generate 25% of the country's GDP, explains Arita. The largest collective is in Catalonia.
Girona is the Spanish province with the highest percentage of the total population with neighbors of this nationality. Some data that show the need for a vice consulate. A fact that has the approval of the Government, as explained by the sub-delegate in Girona, Albert Bramon, and of the Honduran authorities. Acodehgi sources claim that the premises are already available, which could open its doors during the first quarter of next year. Sources from the Honduran consulate in Barcelona indicate that they will announce the exact opening when the passport team arrives. It will be the city's eighth consular office. A fact that will make life easier for many residents, who until now had to travel to Barcelona to resolve the formalities. Another demand is the approval of the driver's license, a procedure that could arrive soon. The collective also denounces the difficulty of validating studies. "There are people who are well prepared, with university careers and jobs below their capabilities", says Arita, who calls for greater agility in the approval process.
