Lamine Yamal, A New Symbol Of The Evolving Migration Narrative

–Op-Ed–

ROME — When young Lamine Yamal caught the French national team goalkeeper off guard with a precision curling shot, we all knew it was something beyond a simple goal.

The Spanish team’s new hero, (full name: Lamine Yamal Nasraoui Ebana), is just shy of his 17th birthday, and resembles many of us connected to migration in Europe. We are children of the diaspora, and of our parents’ dreams.

It was immediate— even for people like me, at the age of 50 — to identify with Yamal. And, of course, with his family too.

We looked at the pride in the eyes of his mother, Sheila Ebana, from Equatorial Guinea — her golden hair, her very black skin. We looked at the smiling eyes of Moroccan father Mounir Nasraoui. Our hearts literally burst when we found a photo on the Internet of his grandmother, Fatima — a petite Moroccan woman wearing a cardigan and a hijab as white as a madonna’s veil.

Children of tenacious families

Fatima was the first to choose to emigrate. It was she who opened that path that took the Nasraoui clan from Tangier to Madrid and then to Catalonia.

We are all Lamine Yamal, but we are also his mother Sheila and his father Mounir. We are his grandmother Fatima. And we are the shining determination of their dreams.

These are families who grit their teeth

Yamal is just one symbol of the so-called second generation (an obsolete term that should be changed because it tends to exclude many), the faces of an expanding diaspora empowering itself from near and far. We also see ourselves in his teammate Nico Williams, whose parents walked across the Sahara to give their son a chance.

These are families who grit their teeth and push through to achieve in a Europe that often considers non-white or non-national bodies to be too much, a hindrance, a danger even. Families who, despite those attitudes, continue to try their best. The reality is far more nuanced than what the mainstream tells us.

Not a fairy tale

Take also, for example, emerging Italian tennis star Jasmine Paolini — Polish mother (who came to Italy to work) and Italian father. But also Polish grandmother and Ghanaian grandfather.

Sports shows us endless stories. Paola Egonu in volleyball or Yeman Crippa and Marcell Jacobs in athletics.

At first glance, their stories could look like the ending of a fairy tale: they all lived happily ever after. But they didn’t. There is unfortunately a symbolic and bureaucratic resistance to this plural Europe from a part of our continent. There are still too many hostile words — and hostile laws.

In Spain, for example, a word, “Mena,” is used to refer to nonwhite, working-class suburban youth. The word is short for unaccompanied foreign minors, but usage has turned it into a racist, demeaning, criminalizing slur for young people.

In Italy, on the other hand, we know that a citizenship law for the children of migrants born and/or raised in the country has been missing for too long. People who are part of this country, but because of the shortsightedness of politics are considered foreigners in their own nation.

The risk of being swept away is high.

In Italy, a talent like Lamine Yamal would not even have been summoned to the national team. Not only because of the lack of legislation that would grant him citizenship, making him a foreigner for life, but also because of the color line that demarcates a national-popular-colonial space like soccer.

Unaccesible realms

And not all fields are created equal. We still swim within white, very classist, inaccessible worlds. Think of radio, television, newspaper editorial offices, universities, schools, cinema, theater, politics, science, our intellectual class. These are environments that people with migrant backgrounds rarely enter. And when they do get in, it also comes with healthy doses of compromises and suffering. The risk of being swept away is high.

Think of the story of Dacia Valent, Europe’s first Black member of the European Parliament, whose brother Giacomo was killed with 63 stab wounds in Udine in 1985. She became an MEP in 1989 only to be wiped out by the system. In fact, if one examines her story, one sees that it was the violence of the structures, the nefarious circle of those who would not listen to her words, that ultimately destroyed her.

Now, as always, Italy, Spain, and all of Europe have a chance to change course. Yamal’s story — but also Nico Williams’s and Jasmine Paolini’s — instinctively speak to our hearts. No matter what our backgrounds. But how do we transform these stories into new policy, and new attitudes?