Holandaman.org addresses issues of migration, integration, and xenophobia, specifically in what concerns hybrid models of new social groups like the Dutch Muslims in Argentina. This online project offers a poignant audio and visual tour through different individual testimonies questioning their consequent struggle to integrate in the society they live in.
Some of the many examples:
"Our parents came to the Netherlands for a while, we didn’t think we were there permanently. No longer migrants or refugees, nolonger on the move. They were called asylum-seekers, guest workers or non-Western immigrants. Our generation was given a different name, the new Dutch.
Ee thought we were integrated. We understood less andless of our parents’ native culture, and were no longer fluent in their language. We spoke and dreamt in Dutch. But there was more expected of us, always more."
"But after September 11, the Netherlands also fell prey to the spectre of xenophobia. It turned out they didn’t trust us, hated us and thought Islam was a backward religion. The integration was a fiasco, they kept saying more and more often. So was I suddenly a failure too?"
"At any rate, we had to prove we knew how to behave. They talked about our religious fundamentalism, our violent ways of avenging our honour and settling other matters, our custom of importing spouses from back home. It was time we abandoned those barbaric cultural customs. And expectations kept going one step further."
"After all those years in the Netherlands, it turned out to be impossible for us to be 100% loyal, 100% Dutch. We were under the command of a god many of us didn’t even know. Time and again, we were implicitly forced to condemn events in the Netherlands and abroad, and had our tolerance tested. Who we were was clear and no longer something we ourselves had any control over. But what was actually the basic issue?"
