There’s a word that, in recent years, has begun appearing in Spanish dictionaries and, slowly, elsewhere too: aporophobia. It isn’t a technical term reserved for specialists — it’s the precise name for something almost everyone recognizes from direct experience, even if we rarely call it by name: the discomfort, wariness, or instinctive rejection we feel toward a person living in poverty.
The word was coined by Spanish philosopher Adela Cortina in 1995. It comes from the Greek aporos, “without resources,” combined with phobos, “fear” or “rejection” — literally, rejection of those who lack means. While studying the mechanisms of discrimination, Cortina noticed that what we often call xenophobia actually hides something else. A foreign professional who arrives in a new city with money, a degree, and a good job is usually welcomed with curiosity, sometimes even admiration. Someone who arrives instead with nothing, asking for help or a place to sleep, meets distance, suspicion, unease. The same happens with people living on the street in their own city, who never crossed any border at all. It isn’t difference itself that unsettles us, then, but poverty: what we fear, at bottom, is someone who seems to have nothing to offer us in return.
Cortina gathered this reflection into her book Aporofobia, el rechazo al pobre: un desafío para la democracia (Paidós, 2017), which became a reference text in the debate on discrimination and social exclusion. That same year, Fundéu BBVA — the foundation that monitors correct usage of Spanish — named aporophobia word of the year, and the term officially entered the Diccionario de la lengua española of the Real Academia Española.
Recognizing this mechanism in everyday life doesn’t require dramatic gestures. It’s enough to notice, honestly, how our gaze or tone of voice changes toward someone asking for money compared to someone who seems successful; to notice how often we look away, out of haste or discomfort, from a person sitting on the ground. Social psychology has long observed that giving a precise name to a widespread behavior is often the first step toward correcting it: what remains unnamed is harder to see, and therefore harder to change.
Perhaps, then, the question this word raises isn’t so much “do I know what aporophobia is?” but rather “how many times, without realizing it, have I practiced it myself?”. Looking honestly at that question, without guilt but with real curiosity, is already a small step toward making our view of the world a little fairer.
Sources
- Adela Cortina, Aporofobia, el rechazo al pobre: un desafío para la democracia, Paidós, 2017.
- Fundéu BBVA, “Aporofobia, palabra del año 2017” (fundeu.es).
- Real Academia Española, Diccionario de la lengua española, entry “aporofobia”.
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