Of Chicks, Lice and Mackerel: Carnival and Transgression in a Cosmopolitan Spanish Enclave in Morocco

ABSTRACT

In 2006, a group of Ceutan Carnival performers were sued for their anti-Muslim lyrics, resulting in a convoluted trial that took six years to resolve. Ceuta is a small, cosmopolitan Spanish enclave on the Mediterranean coast of Morocco. Its Christian, Muslim, Hindu and Jewish communities are tenuously held together by the City-led ideology of convivencia, that challenges mono-cultural models of Spanishness in favour of the idea that that Ceuta's ethno-religious groups live in harmony, all being validly Spanish. This paper contends that the Ceutan Carnival does not fit functionalist theories describing it as a stress-tap that reproduces power-relations by temporarily allowing their transgression. The long-drawn-out trial, which incurred vicious feuds, spiked tensions between Christians and Muslims, collapsed ‘convivencia’, and challenged the authority of State institutions, suggests that the Ceutan Carnival is an uncomfortable space, better understood if treated as a Foucaultian ‘mirror’, a space where society appears to itself as dangerously anarchistic, making individuals long for, not resist, State control.

KEYWORDS:

• Foucault
• Mediterranean
• scapegoat
• multiculturalism
• Islam

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the ‘Royal Anthropological Institute’ under the Emslie-Horniman Research Grant Scheme.

Notes

1. Ideologically, if not in practice. Being a border-region, Ceuta has less self-governing power in relation to the Peninsular regions of Spain. Opposition parties, in fact, claim that the ‘Autonomy’ given by the 1995 Statute was a joke, and still lobby for greater administrative powers.

2. Famously, gold-smithing.

3. The Roma, Chinese and Sub-Saharan groups are collectively known as the ‘Little Cultures’ (las culturas pequeñas), so named because of their small size and lack of formal, political organization. The Roma community was until recently considered to be a sub-branch of the Christian group and the Chinese community middle little in Ceutan politics. The Sub-Saharan community, populated mainly by irregular migrants, broadly divides itself into two: the Francophones and the Anglophones. These organized groups are engaged in what has been dubbed ‘the War of the Little Euro (la guerra del eurito)’ with both factions struggling to control parking lots and supermarkets to offer petty services in return of a small tip called the ‘dale’ (Lit: Give him). In contrast to reports from other Mediterranean societies, notably Malta and Greece, I have no evidence of Ceutans considering Sub-Saharans a threat to Ceuta's ‘Spanishness’ or its multicultural order between August 2011 and December 2012, when I conducted fieldwork in the City. The Moroccan-Muslim other (Moro) remains the primary antagonist to both Christian and Muslim Ceutans. The presence of Sub-Saharans, their plight and occasional unruliness (e.g. July 2012, when tensions escalated into a pitched battle between Anglophones and francophones in Ceuta's main market) are rather seen/used as proof that Ceuta is not getting the necessary resources, and is therefore being neglected by the Peninsula. Ceutans are also unhappy about media sources describing them as colonial, xenophobic watchdogs of Fortress Europe. They feel (rightly so) that such accusations do not grasp the complexity of legal regulations in Ceuta or the efforts they make with convivencia as a multicultural project.

4. The giving of nicknames entire towns is common in the Straits of Gibraltar. Thus, the people of Malaga are known as the ‘boquerones’ (anchovies). Those from Algeciras are known as the ‘especiales’ (the special ones). The inhabitants of La Linea go by the unflattering name of ‘piojosos’ (louses, vagrants), probably owing to their dependence on Gibraltar. Similarly, the Spanish-speaking population of Gibraltar are called the ‘llanitos’ (those of the plain/those who lie down), partially because as poor migrants they settled on the flat isthmus at the edges of the town rather than on the slopes of the Rock itself, but mainly because they are thought to have renounced their origin in favour of servitude to the British masters.

5. Of course, one need not be necessarily born in Ceuta to be recognised as a defender of Ceuta's Spanishness and having a grasp of the way its convivencia works (or not!). These individuals are often awarded the informal, affectionate title of ‘honorary Ceutan’ (caballa honorario) by their friends. By contrast, one could also be born Ceutan, but fail to live up to these expectations. Muslims, often seen as threats, are particularly vulnerable to having their Ceutan identity (and thus their Spanish one) denied, often with horrific consequences (i.e. discharged from work, spied upon, denied movement, denied welfare, etc.). This article deals with this latter dynamic.

6. The Ceutan Parliament has 25 seats. At the time of research from August 2011 to December 2012, the Partido Popular, under the leadership of Juan Vivas, occupied 18 seats. The opposition was composed of the Socialist PSOE with 3 seats, and a coalition of parties known as ‘Caballas’, led by Mohamed Ali and Juan Luis Arostegui, with 4.

7. Literally meaning ‘coming half way’.

8. That is to masturbate.

9. Rapid Intervention Unit: an elite police unit. It has been reported that its suspects, mostly Muslim, are secured using excessive violence.

10. The ritual slaughter of animals, and especially the children's participation in such rituals, is seen as barbaric and disgusting by most Christian Ceutans.

11. A famous statue of Christ ‘Ecce Homo’.