About twenty foreign residents in Galicia and the NGO Ecos do Sur from A Coruña have taken a leap in the fight against xenophobia.
They have teamed up with the Catalan organization Be Another Lab to design immersive videos that allow anyone to feel in the body of an immigrant.
Just by adjusting a pair of virtual reality glasses, one will be able to see himself in a strange country without a residence permit, and listen to how a builder who has exploited him as a bricklayer blurts out that he is not going to pay him.
Or face as an aspiring tenant the faces that the owner of the apartment makes when he hears him speak with a Latin American accent.
"We do not seek to be poor or pity, but rather that everyone sees reality and breaks the stigmas, that they stop thinking that we are going to damage the apartment, squat it or put 300 people in it,"
The objective, Del Corral adds, is for citizens to "better analyze" the daily reality of immigrants and not fall into the trap of hate speech.
Ecos do Sur aims to reach those "people who have never suffered discrimination and who find it difficult to put themselves in the shoes of those who have," explains Natalia Monje, head of communication.
The cognitive game goes beyond the images seen through the glasses.
The experience includes tactile sensations.
If you arrive at a train station, the participant will carry a suitcase and will feel the wind on your face when you leave the building.
If the experience includes a hug, you will notice firsthand that someone is giving it to you.
And the smells will not be missing.
Some twenty immigrants from a dozen countries have participated in the preparation of the scripts and have acted as actors and actresses in the filming of the videos.
They have opened the doors of their homes to give them more authenticity and inside the houses, if you drink coffee, it will smell like coffee.
The participants have recounted the discriminatory situations that they have suffered and that have hurt them the most, those that in their opinion should be eradicated from society as soon as possible.
But they have also reserved a place for positive experiences, for nostalgia, for gratitude.
Everything has been done in four days.
Currently, the videos are in the editing process, explains Ecos do Sur.
The A Coruña NGO intends to take these videos, as soon as they are ready, to the streets, to schools, to centers for the elderly.
Those responsible have not yet decided how, but the idea is that the greatest possible number of citizens can live the experience and that the immigrants in whom they have incarnated for a few minutes are there, next to them, when they take off their glasses.
Recording at the A Coruña train station, in an image provided by Ecos do Sur.
The Dominican Ivelisse Figueroa arrived in Spain five years ago and in the videos she tells the luminous story of a woman who gave her a job when she arrived to take care of her mother.
"She is now my friend and she is like my daughter's grandmother," explains this 37-year-old immigrant.
"Not everything is bad, as a migrant you experience beautiful things," she emphasizes.
She believes that the campaign "can be effective" against xenophobia and "change the point of view" of those who agree to live what they live.
Peruvian Paola Castillo, 31, narrates in the first person the weight of loneliness when she is thousands of kilometers away from her family and friends.
Her grandfather died in her country and she had to grieve as with the covid, without consoling kisses or hugs, and "with a young son with whom she had to hide" her sadness.
The Chilean Alejandro Alegría, 43 years old and who has been living in Santiago de Compostela for eight months, collaborated in the video about the labor suffering of immigrants.
The story of the bricklayer who does not get paid stems from the experiences of various participants and has "a happy ending", he clarifies, which is better not to reveal.
Some of the hardest experiences were heard in that working group on employment.
A Colombian woman reported that she was sent by an agency to work in a house where she was rejected for being a foreigner.
In order not to lose her job, she spent 30 days ringing the doorbell of that house without getting an answer and spending her working day on the street, until the company changed her family.
Alegría is convinced that virtual reality can help "tear down negative thoughts towards different cultures and skin colors".
Del Corral attributes a special power to this technology: “It totally involves you in situations that are sometimes hard to understand.
It is not watching a report or a documentary, it is living the reality of others”.
Virtual reality video workshop against hate at the headquarters of Ecos do Sur in A Coruña.
The Ecos do Sur initiative is part of a broader project called CibeRespect Link.
It was born in 2016, when the association became aware of the rise of hate speech and misinformation.
They came face to face with the problem when reading the comments on a report that a local newspaper had published about immigrants receiving Spanish classes at their facilities.
“95% of the almost 200 comments were negative and brutally attacked people who simply recounted their dreams and what they had left behind when they emigrated,” recalls Monje.
The association began to monitor reports on migration in the media and was surprised at the volume of hateful reactions on the Internet.
This is how those responsible discovered "the International of Hate", groups that are "organized", noisy and "with many resources" that dedicate themselves to designing hoaxes and "discriminatory narrative strategies" to connect with the prejudices and fears of citizens through of social networks.
To combat them, they allied themselves with three Catalan NGOs and developed a methodology to measure the phenomenon and train cyber-activists willing to uncover the hoaxes on which it feeds.
"60% of the population is not openly racist, sexist or xenophobic but is part of what we call ambivalent: depending on how things go, they can be dragged" by these discourses,
Immersive videos are a leap in the CibeRespect Link project, which in recent years has developed 27 initiatives.
With virtual reality, “it goes more to the experiential”, to compete with the “high emotionality” that those who spread hatred abroad manage.
Until now, Ecos do Sur has relied more on data to dismantle hoaxes.
"Responding with data in the same spaces where hate speech moves is sometimes necessary but it is not always effective," Monje argues.
"A year ago we started with the strategy of narrative innovation, of influencing the invisible [prejudice] through words."
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