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Paper short abstract

Solidarity based on locally rooted activism that addresses people’s needs, as seen in two case studies in Catalonia, illustrates how sharing resources without asking for ideological alignment or organizing open mutual aid assemblies can make it possible to connect different people in struggle.

Paper long abstract

How does an anarchist bookshop become frequented by Filipino nuns, an association of Moroccan women or a communist youth organization? How can the left in a medium-sized city overcome historical ideological divides and start organizing together with migrant communities? This paper draws on two case studies in Catalonia to examine the building of alliances and solidarity based on locally rooted activism that addresses people’s everyday needs. Although being two distinct organizing experiences, both cases help illuminate ways of bridging people and struggles.

The aforementioned bookshop is run as a “rearguard organization” in a predominantly migrant neighborhood, providing resources for people organizing whether a protest, a concert or a meal for a hundred people. There is a specific practice of generosity, and of not asking for ideological alignment, that makes it possible for “unlikely alliances” to happen, as one of its members put it.

The second case study is a network of different organizations that started from a housing group and is now composed by more collectives addressing people’s basic needs and rights, mainly made up of migrant people. While a lot of non-migrant activists in the city used to organize around their political identities, the network’s organizations’ grounding on everyday problems has made it possible to overcome divides, and to become a stronger political actor.

Without neglecting the role of ideology and acknowledging the existence (and also importance) of political differences, the paper explores concrete practices of solidarity to sketch useful strategies for building “unlikely alliances” in different contexts.