Border beings. Present absences among migrants in the Spanish enclave of Melilla

Abstract

Death is a constant feature of lives lived at the borders for migrants trying to reach Europe without the necessary authorizations from nation-states. At the border between Melilla and Morocco, many stories are told about near death experiences during attempts to cross both land and maritime borders, as well as about abandoned bodies. Other common narratives focus on the living dead, on the missing presumed dead, on unidentified bodies, and on the living who continue to be haunted by the disappeared. Drawing on ethnographic material, this paper examines the ways in which migrants’ journeys and subjectivities are shaped by death on the migrant trail to Europe.

Notes

Notes

1 Compiled by Gabriele del Grande, an Italian journalist who was one of the first to count deaths at the borders. His blog: http://fortresseurope.blogspot.com/p/la-fortezza.html

2 Melilla is a 12 km² territory on the northern shores of Morocco’s Alboran coast —the western most portion of the Mediterranean Sea—. Together with Ceuta, they form the EU’s only land borders with Africa. Melilla traces its Spanish past to the 15th century, along with other places by the North African coast that were turned into presidios, where prisoners performed the heavy manual labor of construction, repair and maintenance of fortifications and other military facilities (Pike, 1978, p. 22). In the second half of the 19th century, the enclave became a free port. Administratively, Melilla was part of the Province of Málaga until 1995, when it became an autonomous city. As the narration unfolds, other footnotes will shed light on the specificities of the enclave, especially regarding migration issues.

3 So far, I have never had the opportunity to build relationships of trust with women who have experienced border crossing, either around the enclave or on the Moroccan side where I only meet people through others (mainly men) who lead me to them. The same is true in Melilla, where the women mostly stay in the CETI. While the migrants in the CETI are allowed to leave, outsiders do not have access to the center. The women’s choice to stay inside and only go outside occasionally in groups is probably explained by the lack of legitimacy for a woman to be in the public space, especially if she is alone and far from home. On how women experience border life, see Tysler (2018).

This research was carried out with the support of the French-Quebec research program MECMI: Morts en contexte de migration ANR-16-FRQC-0001.

4 All unauthorized migrants over 18 arriving in the enclave of Melilla are sent to the CETI before being transferred to the Iberian Peninsula.

5 All the names that appear in this article are fictitious. While this may seem counter to the motivations of my interlocutors, who, as it will become clear in the coming pages, are constantly fighting against anonymity, all of those who are still alive today are, at the time of writing, living undocumented somewhere in the EU, and I do not want to risk jeopardizing their chances of regularizing their administrative situation. As for the deceased mentioned specifically, I did not have the opportunity to contact their relatives and ask for their permission and so I prefer to avoid using their names also.

6 The lack of a standardized procedure to deal with these deaths may be considered what anthropologist Jason De León calls necroviolence, that is, “violence performed and produced through the specific treatment of corpses that is perceived to be offensive, sacrilegious, or inhumane by the perpetrator, the victim (and his or her cultural group), or both.” (De León, 2015, p. 69). This postmortem corporeal mistreatment is reminiscent of the politics of “not caring about nor caring for” noncitizens in the United States, described as the “necropolitics of uncare” by Jonathan Inda (this volume).

7 My interlocutors often use the term “somebody” to refer to their desire to be known, to be someone who is respectable and respected by their peers at home, through various means (whether by accumulating wealth or succeeding in the music industry, in football, etc.). Becoming “somebody” is contrasted with the shame of being “nobody,” as many express it. It is this hope of reinventing themselves that border-crossers highlight in their narratives when they explain why they accept to risk their own lives. They all say they want to escape from a life “without anything,” a life they perceive as lost and anonymous. My interlocutors accept the risk of dying rather than enduring the risk of being “nobody.” Simply put, the idea behind this is that risk reaps reward. The reward is becoming “somebody” who will leave a trace in his time, among his peers and family at home.

8 Meaning “exit,” the term salida is employed both by CETI personnel and migrants to refer to the decision to send the person to the Iberian Peninsula.

9 Once on the other side of the Mediterranean Sea, they can be confined in a detention facility in order to organize their deportation from the national territory or they can be hosted by an NGO providing health, social, and legal aid for some months. The type of care they receive varies according to the NGO. Migrants can thus find themselves in collective shelters or in apartments shared with 4, 6, or 10 people. In all cases, this provision is currently scheduled for a three-month period, renewable once.

10 The construction of a fence all along the 12 km border between Melilla and Morocco began in 1998. At the time, it was one single fence. Subsequently, a second 3-m high barrier was also built in parallel to the first. In 2005, as a response to several attempts by border-crossers to jump the double fence—described in the media as “crisis de las vallas” [the crisis of the fences]—the government decided to raise the fences in question to 6 m and build a three-dimensional rope, known as the third fence, aimed at preventing any passage between the first and second barrier (APDHA, 2014). During the 2005 attempts, bullets fired from both sides of the border killed at least eleven people and injured hundreds of others (Migreurop, 2006). Barbed wire can be found all along the border and a sophisticated network of underground cables is linked to electronic noise and motion sensors. This surveillance is completed by night vision video cameras and increased numbers of law enforcement agents from the Gendarmerie royale marocaine and the Guardia Civil constantly patrolling the border. From 2006 onwards, this time in order to respond to what the Spanish media called the “cayucos crisis,” the new “Africa Plan” led to agreements being signed with some of the countries that are the point of departure for the boats, i.e. Senegal and Mauritania, so as to reinforce border control cooperation (APDHA, 2014). The crossing of the border at Melilla mainly takes place by land, unlike the strategies developed by border-crossers trying to reach Ceuta, which combine attempts to cross by sea with attempts to scale the fences. In 2015, in the context of the war in Syria and the so-called “refugee crisis” in Europe, Spain opened an Office to handle asylum claims at the borders in Melilla and Ceuta. At the same time, the Guardia Civil reinforced its surveillance deploying 600 officers in Melilla alone and a rotating unit of 180 guards exclusively dedicated to border surveillance (Migreurop & Gadem, 2015, p. 3). As for Morocco, it has dug a ditch between the first fence and the road in strategic border zones (APDHA, 2016, p. 53).

11 These narratives were not only collected from migrants discussing border crossing, but also from activists and people working on institutions dealing with migrants in Melilla and Nador.

12 This question of the life and actions of human-generated technologies is clearly illustrated by Bruno Latour’s example of the shepherd who installs a fence that prevents his sheep from escaping. The fence becomes an actor that is fully part of the social world of both the shepherd and his sheep (Latour, 1994).

13 This resonates with the way in which the intimate experiences of gender violence can only be shared in spaces dedicated to this, as María Martínez shows in this volume.