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Between Morocco and Spain CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by Helsingin yliopiston digitaalinen arkisto Marko Juntunen Institute for Asian and African Studies University of Helsinki BETWEEN MOROCCO AND SPAIN Men, migrant smuggling and a dispersed Moroccan community ACADEMIC DISSERTATION To be publicly discussed, by due permission of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Helsinki in auditorium XIII, Unioninkatu 33, on the 12th of October, 2002 at 10 o' clock 2 Helsinki University Printing House, Helsinki 2002 ISBN 952-91-5052-0 (printed) ISBN 952-10-0666-8 (PDF) 3 CONTENTS Note on transcription Foreword INTRODUCTION 9 Men on the move: presences and absences The political space of migration The setting: the leaking community of L´araish Why study men as gendered subjects? Gender in an unbounded setting Gender through practical discourses Is rudzūla masculinity? arrāga as persuasion On the structure of the work CHAPTER I 22 Cafés and quarters, telephone booths and satellite antennas Reflections from the cafés The quarter through facts and figures Articulating connections CHAPTER II 32 The "hidden migration" The new migration arrāga: migrant smuggling Gibraltar: from channel of connections to separating boundary CHAPTER III 44 Street wise Negotiating social relations The politics of confronting class boundaries CHAPTER IV 62 Between past and present, between Morocco and Spain L´araishi – members of the idealised community The true originals: place and belonging in L´araish The moral community Narratives of "betweenness" Wrestling with bureaucracies Muslims in between The ambiguity of us: "betweenness" and joking Conclusion: the multiple originals CHAPTER V 86 The shifting conditions of manhood: work, person and prestige Interpreting social order urūf: Enveloping the realities of life Establishing connections "urūf teaches the jobs": social relations of work Images of the "bosses" Dabbar: social arrangements Conflict and reciprocation 4 CHAPTER VI 111 Building futures with women Tayyib and Malika Images of women Ambiguous providers: male self-images Pre-marital relations Capitalization of the marriage market Mustafa CHAPTER VII 128 Sociability and sentiment Dawra – evening tour Friendship and urūf Domestic provider, freewheeling bachelor Repressed frustrations CONCLUSIONS 141 Moral bodies Acknowledgements Bibliography 6 Foreword Today in every part of the globe people are more mobile than ever, but also more than ever denied the right to cross national borders freely. Both global mobility and imposed restrictions on crossing national boundaries give structure to individual lives, offering considerable material and socio-symbolic gains for some and major tragedies for others. One of the busiest informal routes for entering Europe from Africa is paved in the rough waters of the Strait of Gibraltar. Every year several thousand Moroccan and other African youngsters cross the Strait of Gibraltar on small open boats and join the ranks of migrants without documents in Spain, Italy, France and elsewhere in Western Europe. A mere fraction of the actual attempts are successful – every year for several dozen Africans the journey over the Strait of Gibraltar becomes their last trip. For others arrest and quick deportation from Europe put a harsh end to their dreams for the future. A very significant number of Moroccan adolescents and young adults are linked to black market migration even if they never leave their home communities: they may offer different services to prospective migrants by arranging for documents, visas, work contracts, translation services or they may actually serve as middlemen for migrant smugglers. My trip to the Northern Moroccan town of L´araish [Al ´Arā'ish in literary Arabic], which was to be the main "field" of this study in fact started almost seven years before I actually embarked on a fieldwork journey for Morocco in January 1998. Since the beginning of the decade I had been interested in how international leisure tourism launches forms of mobility from Africa to Europe. I gained my first impressions of Northern Morocco in 1991 while undertaking studies in Modern Standard Arabic at Muhammed V University in Rabat. In August 1991 I visited L´araish for the first time with some of my Moroccan friends from the neighbouring town of Ksar el Kebir. In the summer months of 1992 I again spent nearly two months in Ksar el Kebir and the coastal village of Moulay Bousselham engaged in fieldwork, which was to materialize in my master's thesis in 1994. In 1997 I finally applied for a research permit to carry out more thorough fieldwork in Morocco. My initial purpose was to observe male sociability and performances of masculinity in a Moroccan location with marked migrant flows to Western Europe. After almost nine months, I was suddenly welcomed by the Moroccan authorities to carry out my project in the province of L´araish on the Northern Atlantic coast of Morocco. The answer to the question why I was directed to this particular place remains obscure, but it is likely that the official atmosphere in Morocco, given the growing attention paid by the media to questions of unrecorded migration and the human rights aspects of international mobility, contributed to the question. I was soon to understand that my field was situated in an area which had only experienced a rapid increase in cases of migrant smuggling into Spain since the mid-1990s. In fact the whole province was known according to popular Moroccan stereotypes as part of the bilād arrāga [the land of migrant smuggling] – the coastal area stretching from the Northern Atlantic shores of Kenitra to the easternmost points on the Mediterranean coast of Morocco. 7 Northern Morocco. 8 From L´araish to Terrassa: the route of the arrāga. 9 INTRODUCTION Men on the move: presences and absences Belpuig, Catalonia 13.5. 1990 I guess every migrant makes his attempt to reach his goal. When I was in my home country I heard rumours about immigration and its results. People leave their country to live abroad. One year they come with a new car and a lot of money. This is the case that pushed me to be myself an immigrant. So since I am one of them, I have to resist and be as solid as I can to reach my goal. (Personal diary [original English] of Anwar,1 undocumented migrant in Catalonia from 1990 to 1994.) This study concerns the social construction of gender in a context characterised by movement across international borders. What follows can be classified as the ethnography of Moroccan sha´bī2 young men whose lives are deeply touched by "arrāga" migrant smuggling from Morocco to Spain. Ethnography based on participant observation naturally has to take place within certain geographical co-ordinates. The place where I shared moments with these men, some of whom were constantly on the move, was L´araish, an urban locality of some 100,000 inhabitants on the Northern Atlantic coast of Morocco. However, something essential about this place would not have been grasped without extending one's gaze over the northern side of the Strait of Gibraltar, a natural boundary separating Morocco from Spain. Fieldwork in this setting meant not only focusing on people who were present "in the flesh" but also on those absent from L´araish. The town taught an important lesson for a novice ethnographer: without learning to listen to the stories, comments and gossip concerning absent people I would have grasped very little of what was going on in L´araish. The main stage of this study is in Morocco but constant side-tracks opened by the subjects' social connections lead us to Spain, especially to industrial regions around Barcelona.3 The cultural 1 The names of the subjects of this study are all pseudonyms. In order to protect their anonymity I have changed minor details of their lives (occupations, constitution of the family, etc.) and placed their homes in L´araish in other locations than the actual ones. 2 The Arabic term sha´b is in Northern African contexts often attached to urban, in economic terms lower middle class strata of population (see e.g. Singerman 1995, 11). The practical usage of the category in Northern Moroccan settings indicates that its translation in terms of class or income group is not justified. In its adjectival form sha´bī, the term refers to a whole variety of cultural practices, notions of socio-economic conditions, including work, social relations, the quality of social networks and forms of behaviour. Sha´ bī also refers to easy-going sociability and the genuine "down to earth", stereotypical Moroccan character. Furthermore, public figures such as singers or actors with a large popular following are said to have plenty of sha´bīya – popularity. The term sha´bī in Northern Moroccan colloquial Arabic is in its most general usage attached to people without official income [dakhl rasmī] or steady wage labour [´amal rasmī]. Sha´bī also refers to spatial divisions. The "popular quarter" [ayy sha´bī] is in Northern Morocco typically composed of unofficially constructed housing, unpaved roads, and lack of infrastructure, and it has a high prevalence of sheet-metal huts. However, in reality the sha´bī quarter is much more heterogeneous in its social composition than the cultural stereotype leads us to understand. Due to land and property speculation and the rising cost of living, the popular quarter also hosts skilled workers, artisans, lower-level professionals and civil servants. 10 context within which these men operate refuses to be bounded by geographical borders. In short: we are dealing with processes of constructing male gender in a cultural setting which resists labelling in geographical terms. These men, if not actually crossing borders themselves, would very much like to see themselves do so. They identify themselves in complex ways so that notions of 'belonging', 'loyalty' and 'home' are ambiguous and often contradictory.
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