Work, love, refuge, and adventure: contemporary Spanish migrants in the city of Tangier

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the individual trajectories of contemporary Spanish migrants, who decided to live in the Moroccan city of Tangier, by describing the various motives that guide this North–South migration. The micro-sociological analysis of these journeys makes it possible to qualify the migratory factors revealed in the literature, showing that the post-2008 global economic crisis is not the only decisive factor. This paper shows that economic drivers not only should be nuanced, but also cannot be disentangled from more personal ones, such as nostalgia (or lack thereof), affective bounds, religious connections, attraction and/or repulsion for cultural otherness, transnational mobility, youth incarceration, and power relationships.

KEYWORDS:

• Spanish
• migration
• Tangier
• Morocco
• North-South migration

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude to David Stenner (University of California, Berkeley), Fadma Ait Mous (University Hassan II – Ain Chock, Casablanca), and Susan G. Miller (University of California, Davis) who organised the AIMS Annual Conference Mediterranean Crossroads: Spanish-Maghribi Relations in Past and Present in Tangier, Morocco, on 14 and 15 May 2016 and invited me to present my current work on Spanish migration in Morocco.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 www.siempretanger.net & https://www.facebook.com/groups/121483661200362/

2 This research is exploratory. Every migratory experience briefly described in this paper merits being addressed by further in-depth research.

3 An expression often heard from the Moroccans during the fieldwork. Many Moroccan ‘remind’ me during the fieldwork that before joining the European Union, Spain was a poor country and that many Spaniard were coming to find work in Morocco.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the PME (the Swiss Foundation for population, migration and environment) and L’association marocaine d’études et de recherches sur les migrations (Amerm) and more specifically by the MIM-AMERM programme (2014–2016) http://amerm.ma/mim-amerm/.