The absence of an intercultural paradigm in Spain in multicultural urban contexts

Abstract

Discourses on multiculturalism in Spain often refer to the presence of foreign immigrants. This implies that diversity is viewed from a mainly national and ethnic point of view, and has significant gaps, whose consequences are described and analyzed in this article. Using ethnographic material, the author shows how the intercultural paradigm under development in Spain is largely Western-Centric. A model is proposed that seeks, in prac-tice, to interculturalize minorities, making them the objects of public policy, in which there are underlying inequalities, which the paradigm in question fails to examine at the theoretical level.