Ekoka was born in Valencia, but her father was from Equatorial Guinea. She says that growing up, she had to constantly answer the same question: \u201cWhere are you from?\u201d Her father arrived in mainland Spain when Equatorial Guinea was still a Spanish overseas colony, with a Spanish national identity document. Even so, that origin \u2014 \u201cwith a Spanish mother and father\u201d \u2014 has never been fully acknowledged because of the color of her skin<\/a>.<\/p>\n Valencia is no exception. In recent years, cities such as Madrid, Barcelona, Seville and C\u00e1diz have begun revisiting their Black and slave\u2011trading past<\/a> through urban routes, cultural projects and academic work \u2014 a history extensively documented in public and private archives, notarial records, censuses and even Inquisition accounts of autos\u2011da\u2011fe, yet absent from the national narrative. Miguel de Cervantes, for instance, described Seville as \u201ca chessboard,\u201d a reference to its mixed Black and white population, recalls Ana Grau, project manager at ISCOD.<\/p>\n That past is inscribed in the very fabric of the city, even if it\u2019s not always visible. Madrid, for example, still has Calle de las Negras (Street of the Black Women). But in Valencia, the street that for centuries was called Carrer dels Negres (Street of the Black People in the Valencian language) is now called Calle de las Almas (Street of the Souls). It was, Ekoka explains, one of the centers of Afro\u2011descendant life in the city \u2014 a place where families lived and built community for generations. \u201cThere\u2019s no sign to remind us of it; the erasure also extends to the urban space, to the names, to what we choose to preserve and what we don\u2019t,\u201d says Ekoka.<\/p>\n For the historian Jos\u00e9 Antonio Piqueras, who heads the UNESCO Chair on Slavery and Afro\u2011descendence at the Jaume I University in Castell\u00f3n \u2014 the only one in Spain devoted to both issues \u2014 that void is not the result of a lack of reliable sources but of a historical choice. \u201cThere is a lack of interest because there is a basic premise: denying the contribution of Black people to the very existence of the country,\u201d he says, describing it as an effort to align more closely with white Europe. <\/p>\n That exclusion from the national narrative has concrete effects today. \u201cI\u2019ve always known the Manchegan side of my family, but not the African one,\u201d says Esther Ejome \u2014 whose first surname is Garc\u00eda \u2014 a Valencian Afro\u2011descendant teacher, speaking at one of the stops on the Valencia tour. \u201cI was born in this city, and yet my whole life I have felt that my body has been treated as foreign,\u201d she says, echoing Ekoka.<\/p>\n For Ejome, the problem lies in how the narrative has been constructed. \u201cIn the Universal History of Art, for example, Africa didn\u2019t exist, so it wasn\u2019t a universal history, but a Western history. But there have always been Black people on the Iberian Peninsula.\u201d<\/p>\n Support networks<\/p>\n The documentation supporting the presence of Black people in Spain is neither minor nor marginal. Jos\u00e9 Antonio Piqueras says Valencia was one of the main slave-trading cities on the Iberian Peninsula in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. \u201cBetween 1490 and 1520, more enslaved Africans arrived here than in all of the Americas<\/a> during those same years,\u201d the historian explains. He notes, based on the research of historian Vicenta Cort\u00e9s, that \u201cone in three merchants in Valencia was involved in the slave trade\u201d around 1500, when the city was the most populous one in the peninsula.<\/p>\n At certain times, he continues, around 14% of the city\u2019s population were enslaved, and approximately half of those people were Black. \u201cIt was impossible not to see them. They were everywhere,\u201d he says. They worked in noble households, artisan workshops, urban commerce, and public spaces.<\/p>\n Piqueras also insists on dismantling a common assumption. \u201cUntil the 15th and early 16th centuries, slavery was not racialized,\u201d he points out. For centuries, he explains, enslaved people were not predominantly Black, but rather came from the Caucasus or the areas that now comprise Bulgaria and Greece. The shift occurred \u201cfrom the end of the 15th century onward,\u201d when the mass influx of people from Africa<\/a> lowered costs and transformed the system. That is when the identification between enslaved person and Black person took hold \u2014 an association that, as the historian points out, would have lasting consequences.<\/p>\n But the archives don\u2019t just record sales or censuses. They also document support networks and community organizations. Just a few minutes from Valencia\u2019s Central Market, in what is now San Agust\u00edn Square, stood the Cofrad\u00eda de los Negros de la Sagrada Virgen Mar\u00eda de la Misericordia, founded in 1472, \u201cby 40 freed Black men,\u201d according to Ekoka. \u201cIt is one of the oldest documented Black brotherhoods in Europe, and it wasn\u2019t just a religious institution; it was a mutual aid network, an emergency fund, a safe haven.\u201d <\/p>\n The archives record cases like that of Ursola, a Black enslaved woman who was brutally beaten by her owner, Francesch Mart\u00ednez. The brotherhood took her in, nursed her back to health, brought her attacker to justice, and raised the money needed to buy her freedom. Stories like this challenge the image of enslaved people as passive. \u201cThere was agency, there were support structures, and even a figure known as the procurador de los miserables \u2014 something like a public defender \u2014 who helped them report abuses or breaches of contract,\u201d says Ejome.<\/p>\n There were also Black people who achieved recognition in the arts, the military, or the courts. Piqueras notes that the archives document biographies such as that of Juan Latino, a humanist and professor at the University of Granada in the 16th century, or that of Juan de Pareja, a painter and former slave who worked in Vel\u00e1zquez\u2019s studio<\/a> and later pursued a career of his own.<\/p>\n \u201cCurrent racism is sustained precisely by the erasure of the Black presence in this country\u2019s history,\u201d says Yeison F. Garc\u00eda L\u00f3pez, an activist with Conciencia Afro and one of the organizers of Madrid Negro, a route similar to the one in Valencia, in the Spanish capital. \u201cThis country has tried to project a homogeneous, white image, denying its own historical diversity,\u201d he argues.<\/p>\n That\u2019s why he argues that reparative measures are needed \u2014 not just symbolic gestures. They should involve Afro\u2011descendant communities and lead to a thorough rethinking of the national narrative, from school curricula to urban signage, as well as access to archives and cultural production. \u201cWhen that presence is erased, it creates the idea that the presence of Black people is a recent and external phenomenon,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n This is why initiatives like Valencia\u2019s are not merely cultural exercises but interventions in the present. For those who take part in these routes, the effect is immediate: the Central Market is no longer just a modernist landmark, and Calle de las Almas is no longer just another street. Ekoka puts it simply: \u201cYour perspective changes, and the city is no longer the same.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/USYHIPB7MRCQHKANGZUDHRHK7U.jpg\")
Deborah Ekoka, during the tour she organized in Valencia, on April 30.KIKE TABERNER<\/p>\n