A pair of residents of Ceuta were this week refusing to leave their home, which faces Benítez beach, because they feared that some of the thousands of migrants who sleep on the sand each night might break in and refuse to leave. They know what they are talking about because it has already almost happened: a few days ago two migrants climbed up onto their terrace and they had to throw them out. On Thursday, on that same beach, a group of Ceuta residents stormed the migrants’ camp and, while the Moroccan migrants ran away, the protesters destroyed their shacks, threw some of their belongings into the sea and burned the rest in a large bonfire along with blankets, the bamboo poles used as makeshift structures and the backpacks they found.

And Leila Mohamed, a Ceuta resident from the El Príncipe neighborhood, said on Wednesday that she had seen a neighbor that morning with a knife cut on her cheek — done, she said, by a migrant she found inside her garage. That same night, after a protest that lasted into the early hours, a group of Ceuta residents roamed the city center with sticks looking for Moroccans walking the streets or sleeping in doorways.

A month after more than 80,000 people crossed Ceuta’s border from Morocco illegally, the Spanish exclave city is sitting on a powder keg ready to explode — or, likely, one that has already exploded. The tension in the streets, which surged dramatically this week, is such that it is impossible to find someone talking about anything other than the thousands of migrants wandering the streets (the national government led by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez estimates there are 5,000 of them, but the city government says there are more than 9,000), most with little more than a plastic bag holding the items they were given and a mobile phone they desperately try to find somewhere to charge.

On one side, there is a mass of new arrivals with nothing or very little to lose; on the other, a population of 80,000 people fed up with watching their city decay day by day. On one side is, for example, Handala Benktib, a 20-year-old barber from Tetouan, who says his family — his father is disabled — needs money that he cannot earn in Morocco. He adds that he does not intend to return. “Only dead,” he says, then falls silent and asks the reporter: “What will happen to us?” When he is told that, because he is not a minor, the likeliest outcome is that he will be forced to cross back, he asks again: “Then why are they putting up giant tents for us?” referring to the housing centers erected in Loma Colmenar near Tarajal that now house 700 people. He discussed all this on Thursday afternoon on El Trampolín beach, which has become a vast, improvised encampment of huts made from bamboo, cardboard and blankets, tents and mattresses where each night thousands of people — mostly men — sleep by bonfires, observed with fear and outrage by neighbors who watch them from their balconies on the other side of the promenade.

On one side there are people like Handala Benktib and his near-suicidal determination to remain on Spanish territory, shared by many of his fellow travelers; on the other are those such as África González, a 44-year-old Ceuta native and healthcare technician, who says that since the migrants entered the city her children have not left the house for fear of being attacked. They have been confined — like the vast majority of Ceuta children — for a full month, not going to the park, the beach or the street, prisoners in their own rooms. A Muslim girl summed this up on Wednesday on a banner she carried at an anti-migrant protest: “I want to go out and play.”

Fear for Ceuta children is growing as the start of the school year approaches: classes begin on Tuesday, September 8. Some families have already taken steps: Nicole Sarabia, 41, has enrolled her children in Málaga, on the Spanish mainland, where she will move while her husband stays in Ceuta to work. Sarabia explained it on the verge of tears during the protest march that later would destroy the Benítez beach camp. She felt — like the great majority of Ceuta residents — that the central government has abandoned the city to its fate. That view is echoed by Ceuta’s chief, Juan Jesús Vivas, who on Friday described his city as “on the brink of collapse.”

Some migrants sleep in building entrances; others rent rooftops in the El Príncipe neighborhood for €100 or rooms for €10 or €20; yet others sleep on playground swings, on benches along the waterfront, or in out-of-the-way streets turned into seas of blankets. The entrances to the supermarkets Mercadona and Lidl are being guarded by Army personnel, armed with batons, who force the migrants — who flock there to buy food — to line up at the entrance and not enter all at once so as not to overwhelm the shelves or alarm the other customers. Muslim taxi drivers who speak Arabic ferry them around, and Moroccans pester the drivers with questions about their future as if the taxi drivers knew what will happen to them. Food shops serving migrants have so many customers they have had to put up a gate to organize an orderly line at the door.

Some groups of Moroccans wander the city until they reach a police station to sign up on a made-up list someone told them exists to take them to the mainland. Some migrants with enough money go to the Nike store to buy expensive sneakers or take selfies, looking well groomed, in front of the facade bearing the Spanish and European flags at the Ceuta Assembly building, but the vast majority wander the city with nothing, alone or in small groups, wearing the same foul-smelling clothes and dusty, sand-filled flip-flops they had when they swam across the border a month ago.

Ceuta residents, proud of their pretty city, feel pain seeing many parts of it turned into a dump. If it rains, as it did on Thursday morning, everything gets worse because the beach camps flood and the cardboard that migrants collect across the city to build shelters soaks through and becomes useless. Autumn is approaching, and Ceuta gets a lot of rain.

The military are keeping migrants away from the city center, forcing them to walk aimlessly through poorer, peripheral neighborhoods where they are far more visible and everywhere to be seen. Every afternoon since Wednesday there have been demonstrations in which protesters, many wrapped in Spanish flags, criticize the central government for letting the crisis fester and shout “Invaders, expulsion!” They always end up at Benítez beach, facing the migrants who watch from a distance, protected by police. The Moroccans know they are unwelcome, but they refuse to leave. Asked why he persists sleeping on the beach and eating what the Red Cross provides, Bilal Meftahi, 26, a mechanic from Tetouan whose face and gestures show the toll of 30 days outdoors, answers after long thought: “Maybe it will turn out all right.”

This past month will leave scars on Ceuta’s society, which is roughly 55% Christian and 45% Muslim. The economy relies on the salaries of civil servants — mostly Christian — and the service sector, and many fear it is one misstep away from social fracture. With unemployment at 22.2% and clear economic inequality between the two communities, Ceuta has long prided itself on peaceful coexistence between the two religions and has made that coexistence one of its defining features. The two religions mingle in unusual, even surreal ways here: the Christ of Medinaceli has its parish in the El Príncipe neighborhood, which is almost entirely Muslim, and it is not uncommon for residents to accompany the Catholic float during Easter street processions.

But all of this is beginning to crack under the strain of a migration crisis that poisons everything. A Muslim waitress at a central café serving migrants was insulted by some participants in the August 26 protest who called her a “filthy Moroccan” and told her to go back to her country. She replied angrily in Spanish that her country was Spain. The next day, with tears in her eyes and her voice choked with rage and fear, she confessed her children were also locked inside their home because she shares the same fear that something will happen to them, as the rest of Ceuta residents. The café is now on a blacklist circulating in Ceuta of businesses that serve or sell to migrants so they can be boycotted.

Abdellah Mustafa, president of the neighborhood association in the outlying district of Sidi Embarek, is blunt: “They started by attacking migrants; and from there it has moved on to attacking Ceuta’s own Muslims. If Ceuta’s Muslims respond, it’s over.” Sitting in an Arabic café in his neighborhood, he says that no one is more from Ceuta than Ceuta’s Muslim residents: “Because Morocco does not recognize us; and on the peninsula they label us Moors. So we are not from anywhere, except from here.” His mobile phone is overflowing with messages from Muslim neighbors reporting assaults, insults or harassment by members of the Christian community. Abdellah, who is a cook and on vacation, attends to everyone, then hops on his scooter to carry out the exhausting but necessary task he has taken on for the past month: to lead, organize, supervise and run — with nothing more than his mother’s help, a platoon of volunteers and an Arabic-speaking security guard sent by the city government a few days ago — an improvised center that shelters and protects 350 migrant women and about a dozen children. All of them sleep in a giant tent turned into a shelter that sometimes resembles more a madhouse. A cardboard sign on the door reads: “No more room.”

As soon as Abdellah arrives, a child runs to hug him and says: “I saw you on TikTok.” Then he intervenes in a fight between two women, answers a radio call and a TV reporter, receives two representatives from the NGO Luna Blanca — which provides the food — meets with a human rights expert, mediates again in a women’s fight that almost turned physical, tells a child to obey his mother, listens to a man who brings him a 15-year-old who crossed the border and does not know where to go and who is told there is no room for him, solves a dozen other problems on the spot and then hops back on his scooter because something urgent has come up elsewhere. He is tired, exhausted, but he does not give up. He has asked the Ceuta government and the central government to take charge of the women, but they replied that they cannot yet, and asked him to be patient.

He decided to set up that camp with his own hands after he saw a woman who had entered illegally being assaulted by a group of migrants who tried to rape her. He rescued her, chased off the attackers and thought someone had to deal with the problem — and if no one else would, it would have to be him. “Values are shown in hard times,” he says. He condemns labeling migrants as invaders. “That is seeing them as enemies: they are not.” At the same time he is trying with all his might to get them to return to Morocco. “But that will only be achieved through persuasion, not violence. I have already accompanied more than 2,000 people to the border.”

The government is now accelerating efforts and expects to clear migrants from the streets within two weeks. To that end it has already agreed with the city of Ceuta on the sites where they will be housed so that, once registered, their expulsion files can be processed quickly if they are not minors or do not meet the conditions for asylum. Carlos Rontome, a sociologist who directs the UNED center in Ceuta and was vice president of the city government alongside Vivas during the previous migration crisis in 2021, offers a different timeline: “This will last months. In 2021 — and arrivals were smaller then — eight months later there were still unregistered migrants.” Rontome also fears that the social cracks created by the crisis could split Ceuta in two: “Coexistence is a very fragile construct. But there is one crucial thing: without it, Ceuta has no future.”

That vital coexistence for the two communities, built on daily interaction and centuries of history and now at risk, is well captured in a letter Rontome keeps that a Ceuta child wrote at Christmas three years ago: “Dear Melchior, I have been very good. I want a Ceuta soccer team T-shirt. I love you very much. Mohamed.”

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On the cover of issue number 304 of The Indypendent, a “free and progressive” paper printed on gray stock that New Yorkers pick up in libraries, laundromats, conference rooms and subway stations, Claire Valdez and Darializa Ávila Chevalier appeared back to back, both with broad smiles, in those June days when Mayor Zohran Mamdani endorsed them in the state Democratic primaries. When they finally became the nominees for the November congressional elections, Valdez and Chevalier grabbed the issue of The Indypendent, recreated their poses from the cover in person—victorious and amazed that the future had been sketched out for them in advance. One striking detail: both were Latina, the former of Mexican roots; the latter a daughter of Dominican parents. Both alternated Spanish and English on the campaign trail, self-identify as socialists, and worry about the things that concern people like themselves these days: that immigration enforcement might take a neighbor, or that paychecks won’t stretch to the end of the month.

Shortly after the primaries, the Instagram page DSA Latinos Socialistas invited everyone to a conversation where they would sell Venezuelan empanadas and, at the same time, raise funds to help Venezuelans who survived the earthquakes. Four panelists were scheduled for the talk: Ecuadorian Diana Moreno, who had filled Mamdani’s vacated seat as state assembly member for Queens’s 36th District; Illapa Sairitupac, the son of indigenous Peruvian immigrants whom Mamdani also backed and who won the Democratic primary for Assembly District 65; Claire Valdez, running for the 7th Congressional District seat; and Darializa Ávila Chevalier, the candidate for the 13th. A poster in large letters read: “Latina socialist politics in New York: a new era.” They were coining the idea that times had changed.

They were all fresh faces, people in their thirties; none yet had the look or cadence of a conventional politician. They came from roles as community organizers, artists, PhD students, political science graduates and social workers. Politics had not yet left its mark on them, they had not promised anything they hadn’t delivered, and so people went out to vote for them to get rid of the old establishment players. They were part of—and also a product of—the aura Mamdani left in an election that revived the American left, and therefore shared what, as a generation and as members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), others also defended: rejecting any money from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), condemning the genocide in Gaza, and pushing for more affordable cities.

But one thing set Latino politicians apart from their colleagues: when they talked about abolishing the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE, they did not see the idea only as a necessary political stance but as the possibility of ending an agency that detains and deports migrants; migrants were, and are, their own families, friends or neighbors. “At parties or at the dinner table we talked about how much it costs to change immigration status, whether the neighbor was having trouble with immigration authorities. That’s how politics was talked about in my house,” Chevalier told EL PAÍS, recalling the days when she was still a girl born in Miami.

When these candidates talk about labor rights, they do so after having been employed and paid very little themselves: “I’ve had to work since I was 14,” Valdez says; she grew up in Lubbock, in northwest Texas. “I worked in fast-food restaurants and supermarkets. Once, at a Taco Bell, I messed up an order and my manager put those tacos in front of my face and said: you just wasted seven dollars of our product. He threw them in the trash in a very dramatic way to make me feel bad. I was paid $7.25 an hour, so those three tacos were worth an hour of my life.”

These new Latino politicians come from families that invested time and money so their children could study; they later moved, came to New York, and are now holding or seeking federal or state office. It’s not that they were the first Latinos in local or national politics: by then there were already names like Tiffany Cabán, Alexa Avilés, Marcela Mitaynes, Jessica González-Rojas, Kristen González, and the prominent figure Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but more were joining at a moment they described as very particular.

“We are being attacked by agencies like ICE and, obviously, the high cost of living affects Latino families a lot,” says Moreno, who arrived from Ecuador as a child with her sister and parents, who survived by washing dishes in a Mexican restaurant and cleaning hotel rooms. “Our community is living with a lot of fear. Trump is creating undocumented people because he is ending all temporary protected status programs and asylum protections, and that’s something we also have to lead on.”

Just as it’s symptomatic that the DSA’s strength has emerged, precisely, during the Trump era, almost as an immunological reaction, Moreno finds it coherent that more Latinos are becoming interested in socialist policies in the United States. Their own message includes them; the opponent’s excludes them. “It’s like a mirror of what’s happening in Latin America, where we have many governments that, sadly, with the support of the Trump administration, have turned to the far right. In Latin America people are also living the same affordability crisis.”

If Chevalier reaches Congress next year, she would be the first Dominican woman to do so. She sees it as an achievement. “I would be one of the few people in Congress who can speak directly in Spanish to the Latino community,” she says. “We’re seeing more and more Latinos voting for Trump, but we can’t complain when we are not speaking directly to that community. It’s a huge responsibility for me to take this position, to take this office, a responsibility to my district in New York but also to a community that has felt abandoned.”

The district Valdez represents, covering parts of Brooklyn and Queens, has for decades been home to Latino communities that have recently been displaced by high prices and gentrification. She wants to address that. “It’s really important that we have Latino socialists going to Washington to fight specifically for those communities,” she says. “Especially in my district, there’s a long history of organizing, particularly within the Puerto Rican diaspora, to fight bad landlords, build homes and communities specifically in Bushwick and Williamsburg. It’s the same community now under attack due to rising rents, low wages, poor working conditions and ICE harassment.”

And this is precisely one of the common demands all these candidates plan to take to Washington, Albany or City Hall: unite to abolish ICE. “If we take back the House of Representatives, there will be a Democratic majority in Congress that will open a lot of space for us to do work. We have to address the immigration crisis. We have to start exercising real oversight over ICE. That agency has to be abolished and we have to push for an immigration policy that is humane, that is welcoming,” Valdez says.

Chevalier, for her part, says it is possible to return to a country like the one where she was born, back when an agency like ICE did not exist. “What we’re seeing is an enormous risk to our community’s safety; people are being killed in the streets, they’re being separated from their families, children are being separated, jailed and disappearing in detention centers. That does not provide security for anyone. There’s no reason a civil process should look like a concentration camp.”

Rise and criticism of the DSA

Years ago, before she moved to Brooklyn to pursue a career as a visual artist, one of Claire Valdez’s aunts fell ill. She had to be airlifted to a hospital in Texas and remained hospitalized for quite some time. She had no health insurance and was left with thousands of dollars in medical debt. “She was a working-class person who had no ability to pay that money back,” Valdez says. It was 2017, right after the high-profile campaign of independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who identified as a democratic socialist, a leftist ideology that talked about narrowing economic inequality, expanding social programs and advocating for working-class rights.

Sanders’s proposal to spark a “political revolution” was rejected by many sectors, especially those who saw in the idea the specter of communism. Claire felt that, for the first time, someone was speaking for people like her. “Bernie Sanders had been the only person who spoke so clearly about how outrageous medical debt is in the United States, one of the richest countries the world has known. So when he ran again in 2019, I volunteered on that campaign and knocked on doors across the city; I even went to New Hampshire to canvass for him. I got involved in political organizing thanks to Bernie Sanders.”

Sanders’ spectacular campaign was the gateway to the path later taken by the DSA, which drew an army of young people from across the country and then gained strength with the arrival of figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Ten years after that campaign, Sanders, now 84, was first at Zohran Mamdani’s swearing-in as New York mayor and later supporting Chevalier and Valdez in the primaries. The DSA arrived at this moment much stronger: with more than 100,000 members across nearly 200 chapters in the United States, which have found in it the only group that, in the Trump era, speaks openly about responsibility in the Israel–Palestine war, condemns corporate money’s influence, and proposes a reform of the country’s economic system.

“We are in a unique political moment where people are hungry for a new kind of politics in which they can also participate,” Diana Moreno says. The figure of the volunteer knocking on doors has been essential: Mamdani managed to gather about 100,000 people who knocked on some 1.6 million doors across New York City, and who have since recruited other DSA members.

“We’re not telling people: ‘vote for me, I will save you, I will fulfill all those promises.’ Rather we’re inviting people to be part of the movement. You have to put in the work, because democracy is a team sport and that’s something that people aren’t used to. Most of us think participating in democracy means voting every one or two years, or every four, but we’re saying: ‘No, it doesn’t end and begin when we win; it has to be defended and maintained and for that we need you,” Moreno says.

Amid the DSA’s rise—first with Mamdani’s campaign, then with his decision as mayor to back three socialist candidates (nine of the ten New York City candidates endorsed by the DSA won the Democratic primaries), and later with victories by other members nationwide—the organization began to face some pushback. The establishment has compared them to Cuban or Venezuelan ideologies, and many migrant communities from those countries feel a rejection of any proposal that sounds like “socialism.” Moreno does not rule out that the organization needs to reach out to those people.

“Many have negative memories and experiences with their governments, and that’s something we must take seriously, not ignore, and we must speak clearly about the kind of democratic socialism we offer,” she says. “For us it’s extremely important to tie socialism to democracy. Our socialism aims to respond to the current problems of the majority of people; we want more people to participate. People have lost faith in both Democrats and Republicans, because they have seen a Republican Party focused only on its racist project of expelling immigrants, stealing from public funds to give to Israel or their billionaire friends, and Democrats aren’t fighting hard enough to stop those changes. The American people are going through a crisis of democracy, and we want them to find in us, the democratic socialists, an answer and hope for the future of democracy.”

The seventh district, represented by Valdez and covering parts of Brooklyn and Queens, has been labeled the “Communist Corridor” because of the DSA’s electoral strength there. According to Valdez, the criticism comes from many people who “have family experiences, or have themselves experienced authoritarianism and do not want to be associated with democratic socialism or communism.” Still, a Gallup poll last year showed that 49% of Americans aged 18 to 34 had a positive view of socialism, compared with 30% of those over 55.

“I think what we’ve been showing, at least over the last few years, is that democratic socialism in the United States right now has particular characteristics and a particular history. It’s the socialism of Martin Luther King Jr., Helen Keller and many other leaders—something very different from authoritarianism elsewhere,” Valdez says. “For me, democratic socialism is about expanding democracy, ensuring people can be political actors in their own lives. It’s about universal programs like universal childcare, free public schooling, higher education, universal healthcare, expanding rent stabilization and making sure people can afford to live and have real dignity.”

The other criticism socialists have faced recently doesn’t come only from the far-right end of the spectrum but also from mainstream Democrats. Some argue this leftist movement poses a danger to the Democratic Party in the upcoming presidential elections. But the socialists agree that that party has not offered a better option in its recent shots at the White House.

“That’s always been the Democrats’ excuse; they’ve never been able to offer their own vision of what they will give us. It always has to be compared with the fear we should have of the Republicans,” Moreno says, then cites the current immigration crisis as an example. “If the Democratic Party wants to lead, it must create a solution to the immigration problem. They must offer comprehensive, humane immigration reform, which unfortunately has been completely erased from Democrats’ language. I mean, when we now talk about immigration, we only talk about ICE. But when we talk about immigration we have to talk about immigration reform and a dignified path to citizenship that doesn’t take advantage of people, because this country, like it or not, will always depend on our labor, will always depend on our work. The question for Democrats is whether they will accept us as human beings, not just our labor.”

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