Lamine (Montero / Top Manta representative)

With the money we have from the union, we bought 15 t-shirts.

We told an artist comrade here how we wanted our logo, what characteristics it had to have.

We got many drafts and finally we chose a logo that represents us.

We've always said that the brand's logo must be something that represents us.

That's why we chose a boat and a blanket.

10 euros.

And we sold all five shirts for 10 euros each.

Because here, they called us Tap Manta as a way of putting us down.

And we chose the very same name used to look down on us to give it worth.

So far, everything we wanted to do and that we want to do, it's not the same for us people from here.

They go and do it, and that's it.

It's very difficult because social racism continues.

The obstacles remain, and we are seen as foreigners.

It was the people chased on the streets who got their arms broken, who were fined, who were sent to prison.

These people risked their lives and decided to participate in this situation.

It was a terrible, frightening situation, wasn't it?

And at that very moment, we started manufacturing gowns and masks.

We were able to manufacture more than 14,000 items during the lockdown.

We distributed that to hospitals, nursing homes, and also private individuals free of charge.

This allowed us to buy more clothes, to buy screen printing machines and start to print our garments.

The media was looking for us to do stories and asked us to do reports.

And they were no small media.

It was the BBC, Al Jazeera, many large media organizations, even media from Portugal, Italy.

Because everything we do, everything we have achieved, all the successes we've achieved, it's not just because of our work.

Behind our work, there are many conscious people who have shared their privilege with us, who share our pain, the situation in which we lived in, so that we're able to work and change things.

We want the young people who arrive here, or people born here, those who go to school, to college, to have a black role model, an example from their community, where they can get help overcoming the obstacles they encounter here, the social racism they suffer.

Racism that comes from teachers, from the school principals who always tell them that this is not their place and that they're not going to live their lives here, that has to stop.

Right now, for a lot of people, we are a reference.

I feel a lot because I think I was always told that I couldn't.

You're a nobody.

You don't know anything.

And I proved that I can.

I do have the wisdom, and I can do it.

It's the first time in the world that a union of people without papers have achieved what we've done in a few years.

I was in the same situation as all the African youth who, at the age of 18, have to work and support their families and don't have the opportunity to do so.

Fishermen used to use their boats to fish for a week or three days.

They would return with lots of fish.

But now, there are European boats fishing in our seas using bombs and nets.

They've screwed up the whole sea, and now there is no fish.

Many fishermen have decided to transport people coming here to Europe.

I arrived here and they didn't consider at all what I had lived through at sea.

pain, hunger, the obstacles that I had to overcome.

And for the first time, they put me in handcuffs and threw me in a cell without having committed any crime and no reason.

When they tell you you're not going to be deported and they're going to let you live here, the police give you papers that say you have a three-year exclusion.

That means you're in Spain, but it's like you're not in Spain.

The first one is going to work in the fields.

The second one is work as a junkman, looking for metal to sell.

Another path is a very bad path that we don't want to choose.

It's selling drugs.

And the fourth one is selling on the streets.

When you pull the rope, the next thing you do is run as fast as possible.

The first version from the police was that a comrade jumped off his balcony.

When his friends saw him, they noticed that his hands were handcuffed behind his back.

And that created many demonstrations because the police version was unbelievable.

We didn't have a voice.

Nobody cared about our situation.

And nobody knew it either, because you only heard the police's voice, the media's voice, the politicians' voice.

And these three voices didn't speak well about us.

And this union, it represents... The union is an organization of people, mostly from Senegal.

Monteros who have been selling on the street for a long time.

That's why when we founded the union, we started giving talks at universities, schools, and events with activists.

We were invited to many places.

We were enraged.

We had a desire to launch this brand, to have our own products.

It was also a challenge to show society that the person you see on the street doesn't just know how to sell and run away from the police.

We wanted to show that we can participate in the development of society, that we're capable of doing big things.