The Coloniality-of-Power theory, initiated by the Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano, describes the living legacy of Spanish colonialism in contemporary Latin-American post colonial societies as a form of hierarchical social order based on the subjectivized experiences of race, labor and gender. The theory remarks how representations of the European white, the indian and the black, interact with the representations of male and female, and still determine the labor, geographical and social distribution of the Latin-American population. Migration studies have shown to profit very much from the capacity of this theory to understand the social experience of postcolonial migrants and those encountering them.
This paper is based on an ethnographic research analyzing discourses on migration, in Madrid, by Latin-American migrants and Spaniards. The research shows that tensions that are inherent to the coloniality discourse permeate social interactions between immigrants and Spaniards The representations of both, the Latin-American immigrants and the Spanish people permeate all social interactions. While all discourses on immigration tend to be racialized and genderized in the voices of both immigrants and Spaniards, the notions of Spain as the language donor, the welcoming mother country mixed up with those of a fate-shaping, labor explorer and precious-metal stealer former conqueror only appear in the Latin-American immigrants discourses.
