Silencing mestizaje at the Euro-African Border. Anti-Racist Feminist Perspectives on Cross-Border Lives

ABSTRACT

Dramatically marked by today’s European border regime with Africa and a geohistorical oppositional dynamic between Islam and the West, the enclave of Melilla also stands out in Spain for its ethnic, religious and racial diversity. Based on long term ethnographic work, we explore the lived experiences and discourses of people calling themselves mestizas, people of mixed ethnoreligious backgrounds. Delving into the tension of being invisible in discourse and public policies, yet certainly present in the city, their condition is experienced as a relational affective field of care rooted in everyday practices. These practices are silenced by both a rhetorical emphasis on intercultural convivencia and the local and global, symbolic and material bordering of the city. We suggest that the visibilization of the transcultural practices derived from mestizaje sets a perfect ethnographic space to explore current challenges around borders, post-colonial feminist thinking and global mobility.

KEYWORDS:

• Mestizaje
• border studies
• multiculturalism
• postcolonial feminism
• Mediterranean studies
• Melilla

Acknowledgements

Initial research for this article was conducted in the summer of 2018 with Francesco Bondanini, coordinator of the Oxygen Cultural Lab NGO. We thank him and research assistant Nora Hamed Abdelkader, as well as Nabila El Hajoui and Alvaro Delgado, as research interns in the summers of 2018 and 2019. We are also thankful to experts like Vicente Moga, Jose Luis López Belmonte, Sonia Gámez, Alicia Benarroch, Abdeselam Hasan, Ekram Hamu Haddu, Sergio Ramírez, and Ana Giménez and Amalia Sánchez who helped identify and contact people from mixed backgrounds. There are in Melilla so many other people who participated in a way or another, more than we could possibly recognize here. We thank them and, above all, the mestizas and their families who have generously shared their most intimate experiences and memories.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest to report. All participants were provided an Informed Consent Form before interviews or focus groups, following all the requirements of the Ethics Committee of the Autonomous University of Madrid in terms of recruitment, risk information, custody of the data, and data protection guarantees, even though a formal acceptance was not required.

Notes

1 Though this emic nomenclature is well established, categories are contested by the two main groups in Melilla. Melillan Muslims have begun self-identifying as Imazigen (noun) and Amazigh (adjective), naming the indigenous ethnic category in Tamazigh, the autochthonous language. This category comes as a response to the historical colonial name Berber (etymologically rooted in “Barbarian”) as well as Moroccan Arabization. Many “Christians,” on the other hand, question their own religious label, proposing categories like “Hispanics” or “Peninsulares.” Given the multiple and contested criteria behind names, in this article we refer to groups in both emic ways: Amazigh and Muslim, and Hispanic and Christian.

2 Data collection of this type is elusive due to the lack of ethnoreligious categories in the census and civil registry. Because of this, exhaustive and/or recent reviews of total population are non-existent.

3 This method, which we later used for data collection at the Civil Registry, has little margin of error for people from Melilla, since Hispanic, Amazigh, Jewish and Hindu roots are clearly identifiable. There are however some limitations, like identifying some people from the Gipsy group or from a second generation of mixed descent.

4 Llamas Fernández was a Guardia Civil (Civil Guard), head of the Melilla command during the “fence crisis,” and presents this doctoral work about Islam in Melilla and the risk of radicalization. Because of this, his mixed group is limited to Muslim-Christian marriages, crossed with variables of sex and nationality. He pays special attention to marriages between Moroccan and Melillan Muslims, suggesting that it is an “instrumental” use of marriage (230). It is true that both the resident registration process (empadronamiento) and the Alien law heavily restrict access to work and residence permits, making marriage with a Spanish citizen (Amazigh or Hispanic) a common strategy to regularize in the city. However, calling these unions “low quality” reproduces the view of the dominant Hispanic population. The data suggests a decrease in this type of alliances in the past ten years.

5 Qualitative data are unpublished. They are part of over five years of empirical research in Melilla and a long trajectory in studying Southern European and Spanish border formations by the first author.

6 Beyond its role as stage for the ideological formulation of nationalism, Melilla was also a key operational node of the military coup d’état that led to the Spanish Civil War and instated the Francoist dictatorship.

7 Imazigen repeatedly told us that one of the most painful memories of these events is the fact that the Christians supporting them “could be counted with the fingers of one hand.” On the other side, “the whole [Christian] Melilla was there,” coalescing in the massive counter-demonstrations in favor of the full enforcement of the Alien Law (Belmonte Montalbán 2010).

8 According to the EPA, National Survey on Active Population, the unemployment rate in Melilla is 23.4%, and youth unemployment 73.5%.

9 The “Pacto por la Interculturalidad de la Ciudad Autónoma de Melilla” was passed on June 21, 2014 by 80% of the municipal assembly. Although initially a monitoring commission was created, many politicians, journalists and researchers in Melilla share the opinion that it ended up being wishful thinking.

10 The hiring of Akalay Nasser by the Instituto de las Culturas was highly controversial, according to our informants (see Cablemel Tv 2014).

Additional information

Funding

The now-dissolved “Institute of Cultures” of Melilla sponsored the hiring of a research assistant during the summer of 2018, who helped in the compilation of quantitative data and interview transcriptions. The rest of our fieldwork in the city, from 2016 to the present, has been pursued independently, without any official funding.