Back to the Mediterranean? Return migration, economic crisis, and contested values in Southern Spain

ABSTRACT

This article traces how Andalusian return migrants both rebuff and embrace tropes of Mediterraneanness in discussions of the ongoing economic crisis in Spain. Over the last several decades, many Andalusian Spaniards who emigrated during the Franco dictatorship have returned home. They have arrived to a region struggling with economic hardship, political instability, and a sense of marginality to Europe. Return migrants grapple with the disappointment of returning in this context by blaming Andalusia’s woes on both ‘Mediterranean’ afflictions like corruption and economic backwardness and on the influence of amoral European values. They also present themselves both as able to restore older Andalusian moral values and to instill in Andalusia the modern sensibilities they learned abroad. Their assessments of the crisis echo old anthropological tropes of ‘honor’ and ‘shame,’ not as questions of essentialized gender and kin relations, but as framings for a broader political discourse of ambivalence about being Mediterranean as something shameful and honourable visa-vis Europe. In this sense, coming back to the Mediterranean becomes a project not just of migration, but also of moral transformation in which ‘being Mediterranean’ is reconfigured.

KEYWORDS:

• Europe
• crisis
• Mediterranean
• migration
• morality
• Spain

Acknowledgements

I am incredibly grateful to my research participants in Spain for sharing their memories, frustrations, and opinions with me. Many thanks to Naor Ben-Yehoyada and Paul Silverstein for including me in the AAA Roundtable on the Mediterranean that spawned this special issue and for organizing the issue. I also want to thank all of the participants in the 2019 Wenner Gren workshop ‘Going Back: Toward an Anthropology of Return’ for their help workshopping this article, and in particular Laurie Kain Hart for thoughtful discussant comments on this piece. Kathryn Graber and Emily McKee gave useful feedback on an early draft. Finally, a hearty thanks to History and Anthropology for an insightful peer review process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

Funding for this research was provided by a University of Nevada, Reno Scholarly and Creative Activities Grant.