No one is quite sure exactly where or what El Ejido is, not even the people who live there. It is still in the process of inventing itself, violently torn between northern Africa and southern Europe, and apparently unable to contain both identities. El Ejido is where the immigration issue really bites.
Twenty years ago it was not a town at all, more a townland consisting of a few scattered farmhouses. Today, it still has no centre, no happily inhabited urban spaces. It sprawls gracelessly between the hothouses which produce its wealth, and is said to have more banks per square metre than any other town in Spain. It is a self-made community, with all the insecurity which that implies.
Insecurity is a hot topic in El Ejido, on all sides. For many of its 50,000 Spanish inhabitants, the town has become Europe's undefended and porous front line in an undeclared war with the hungry people of north Africa. For its immigrant population, which accounts for up to 20 per cent of its people, it is the place where Spain's largely hidden racism has dared to speak its name.
Last January, two local farmers had their throats cut by a mentally disturbed Moroccan labourer. About 10,000 people took to the streets in angry but peaceful demonstrations. On February 5th, a Spanish woman was stabbed to death by another Moroccan in an El Ejido market.
Cool heads argued rationally that equally violent crimes were committed by Spaniards, on Spaniards, almost every weekend. There were those in the town, however, some of them very well placed, who did not think reason was in their interests.
For the next three days, all roads to El Ejido were cut off, while local people systematically smashed up every Moroccan business in the area. Hundreds of poorer Moroccans were forced to flee their miserable encampments on the town's margins, which were razed to the ground. The municipal police, under the control of a mayor belonging to Spain's ruling Partido Popular, occasionally intervened to save lives, never to save Moroccan property. Some witnesses say they saw local policemen smashing computers on the premises of Almeria Acoge (Almeria Gives Refuge), a Spanish support group for immigrants. The offices of a local feminist group, which had documented the lives of thousands of immigrants, were also ransacked, and all their archives destroyed. Though this attack, and all the others, was supposed to be the spontaneous act of a mob, the police have been unable to find a single fingerprint.
One of the feminist leaders, Elena Malena, and her young son, were nearly killed when a truckload of rioters tried to run them down. She and a colleague still receive threats on a daily basis, six weeks later. "Our homes are like bunkers now," says Mercedes Garcia, one of the tiny minority in the Spanish population who has spoken out against racism. "They want ethnic cleansing here." El Ejido's mayor, Juan Enciso, was not available for interview by The Irish Times. His press officer failed to inform us of a press conference he gave while we were seeking that interview. We were in good company. El Pais, Spain's newspaper of record, also found out about the press conference after it had happened.
When the violence erupted, Enciso had told the interior minister there was no need to send in the national police, until the damage was done. The Moroccans had then responded to the violence by calling an unofficial but very effective general strike. There was some intimidation by pickets, and the national police flowed in. Today, it is difficult to get a room in a local hotel, because 600 extra police are billeted in the region.
Omar El Hartiti is a Moroccan who had done well in Spain. He is married to a Spanish woman from Seville, where they had lived without problems. He came to El Ejido some years ago and set up two telephone exchanges to serve his immigrant countrymen. His facilities were immaculate - shining tiles and steel and glass, with UN posters proclaiming human rights and denouncing domestic violence.
You could see why a racist might have hated Omar, in particular. He shattered the stereotype of the filthy, feckless Moroccan day labourer. So they shattered his property. Today, the glass is smashed, every phone and every computer torn apart, the tiles littered with half-bricks. Then they went to look for him at home. He may be alive today only because he had recently moved house. Omar believes he was targeted precisely because of his success. "They want us to be dirty, that is why they give the immigrants no running water," he says.
"They need us to be poor. The moment we wash ourselves and set up our own businesses, they attack us." Omar has become a leader of a new immigrant association, much more militant than its predecessors. Local farmers accuse him of being an "outside agitator".
El Ejido has become a byword for racism in Spain. But what is happening there is more complex than straightforward racism, if there ever is such thing, and it began with plastic.
When you approach the city of Almeria from the air, it seems to be caught between two seas. To the south is the Mediterranean (and Morocco), as you would expect. But all around the city, and especially to the west, there are great shimmering lakes of reflected light. As you drive west towards Malaga, the sensation changes. Now it seems as though the entire coastal plane and some of the mountainsides have been wrapped in plastic by some demented conceptual artist.
The harsh, semi-desert landscape, once best known as a favoured location for shooting spaghetti westerns, is almost unrecognisable. The plastic, however, is not a mirage or a work of art, though it has produced truly fabulous wealth. The hothouses which envelope Almeria have transformed this dirt-poor region into one of the richest areas in Spain in just two decades.
The first plastic hothouse in the region was built in 1962. It was found to double or treble the number of harvests, rotating aubergines, peppers and melons, for example, in a year-round cycle of soaring productivity. By the late 1980s, farmers who had sweated for subsistence on their own small holdings, and lived without running water or electricity in primitive dwellings, suddenly found they had money in their pockets. They built houses, they built urban conglomorations that pass for towns, and they began to want other people to come and work for them.
Spanish people, newly prosperous under the Socialist Party's welfare state, were increasingly unwilling to do back-breaking, low-paid work. The gap was filled by Moroccans and Guineans and Sengalese and Algerians, and eventually eastern Europeans. But mainly by Moroccans, who live, after all, less than 100 km away, across the Alboran Sea.
The Moroccans should not have been strangers in Almeria. The Spanish still hold two ports on the Moroccan coast.
The immigrants' ancestors had lived in Spain for eight centuries, and given a name, Al Andalus, to the region, and the name cortijo to the now deserted farmhouses in which the luckier immigrants lived. Many of the Spanish residents of Almeria still have Moorish blood. Spanish culture, from flamenco to architecture, is incomprehensible without some knowledge of its rich Arab component. But it is the Moroccans, and not the immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa and eastern Europe, who are the targets of Spanish hatred today.
Many of the Moroccans came into the country legally, but others came in on leaky boats and asphyxiating sealed containers. Some died en route. They all lived almost invisibly in the sea of plastic, many in conditions similar to those of the poorest of Irish Travellers.
Things weren't all bad, and still aren't. Juan Canton, now president of the powerful marketing board for the region's produce, paints an idyllic picture of his relations with Moroccan workers.
"My whole family used to work where they work now. They live where we used to live, but they have running water and light, which we didn't. My wife gives them fish, she gives them flan, as if they were normal people. We take them to hospital when they are sick. We eat with them. There is no racism here.
"The problem comes from the immigration law introduced last year. It was too liberal, and produced a `shout effect', attracting thousands of Moroccans who can't find work, and have to steal in order to live. We have to control immigration."
As if they were normal people. The phrase is used entirely naturally, without intending any offence. Juan Sanchez, then a priest in El Ejido, was one of the first Spaniards to recognise that the problem was precisely that the immigrants were not, generally, treated like normal people. For the farmers, they were a source of labour. For the authorities, they hardly existed at all, and therefore required no housing, plumbing or schooling.
Twelve years ago, he tried to bring the invisible immigrants in from the fields, and give them Spanish classes, medical attention and legal advice in the school that doubled as his church. The parents' association complained that they did not want the Moroccans using the same toilets as their children. Sanchez refused to celebrate Holy Week Masses for a community that called itself Christian but rejected the outsiders.
"They said I was the priest of the Moors. They asked the bishop for a priest for Christians." Sanchez made his life's work the integration of the immigrants, as a founder Almeria Acoge. He hoped, in vain, that the Spanish would remember their own experience of emigration as labourers in the post-war decades, when entire villages in Andalusia packed their bags and sought work in France and Germany.
Perhaps the problem was precisely that the memory of emigration and rural poverty was too fresh in the minds of Almeria's newly rich farmers. The Moroccans held up a mirror to a recent past that was too painful to remember. The current Irish response to immigration, as the Celtic Tiger economy propels us to the prosperous side of the great international divide, is not so very different.
Sanchez's vision of tolerance, now regarded as patronising or even exploitative by some immigrants, made little progress. The Socialist Party, ideologically sympathetic in principle, sensed that the issue was a vote-loser, and kept its head down.
The increasingly powerful conservative Partido Popular, in power in Madrid since 1996, played an ambiguous game. Some ministers preached tolerance, others tacitly backed the refusal of Almerian mayors, especially in El Ejido, to head off the coming crisis by providing decent facilities for the immigrants.
When the crisis came, and the fires were lit, it did not do the Partido Popular any harm. A month after the riots, the PP got its best ever results in Almeria, and won its first absolute majority in Madrid. Since the elections, the PP has sent out a flurry of mixed messages on reform of the immigration law, which it first signed, and then disowned, in the previous parliament.
This lack of direction is perilous in the high-octane volatility of the atmosphere in El Ejido, and right along the Andalusian coast. Immediately after the riots and the strike, a deal about as complex - and fudged - as the Belfast agreement was struck regarding compensation and reconciliation. Today it is the subject of acrimonious dispute, and stable organisations on the immigrant side are losing ground to angry, radical voices.
On the Spanish side, the far right has little weight of numbers, but its ideas are everywhere. Members of a neo-fascist group, Espana 2000, agreed to meet me in, disturbingly enough, the local Irish bar. What happened in El Ejido, Antonio Martinez told me, was "a popular uprising, which you, as an Irish person, should understand".
The Moroccans, he said, "think they are better than us", but insist on "living differently". They thieve persistently, he continued, sub-let rented accommodation to dozens of people, and make it impossible for Spanish women to walk the streets. He added a twist which I heard repeatedly in the region: El Ejido is not racist because they have no problem with the black immigrants, who are clean, don't commit crimes, and don't gather on the streets in large numbers to leer at Spanish womanhood. Some blacks, he said, joined the whites in the anti-Moroccan rioting, a story I heard confirmed elsewhere. Later that day, I heard an almost identical analysis from a friendly barman in another village, who had no contact with far-right politics.
A quick glance at the (seriously underestimated) official figures shows that immigration to Almeria has tripled since 1995, to 26,000. Moroccans make up almost half of it, sub-Saharan Africans less than 10 per cent. If Spain is to accommodate immigration in a civilised way, it is precisely the Moroccans with whom they will have to come to terms.
Familiarity has, it seems, bred mutual contempt. "We could take the French or the English imagining they were superior to us," Omar el Hartiti says dryly, "but not the Spanish. At home in Morocco, a Spaniard repaired my father's shoes." Will he rebuild his telephone exchanges in El Ejido? He is not sure. "They also destroyed my hope," he says. "That is the hardest thing to rebuild."