Language and Muslim Immigrant Childhoods

The Politics of Belonging

Inmaculada Mª García-Sánchez

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780470673331
• eBook ISBN: 9781118323892
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Language and Muslim Immigrant Childhoods

Documenting the everyday lives of Moroccan immigrant children in Spain, this in-depth study considers how its subjects navigate the social and political landscapes of family, neighborhood peer groups, and the institutions of their adopted country. García-Sánchez compels us to rethink theories of language and racialization by offering a linguistic anthropological approach that illuminates the politics of childhood in Spain's growing communities of migrants. The author demonstrates that these Moroccan children walk a tightrope between sameness and difference, simultaneously participating in the cultural life of their immigrant community and that of a "host" society that is deeply ambivalent about contemporary migratory trends.

The author evaluates the contemporary state of research on immigrant children and explores the dialectical relations between young Moroccan immigrants' everyday social interactions, and the broader cultural logic and socio-political discourses arising from integration and inclusion of the Muslim communities. Her work focuses in particular on children's modes of communication with teachers, peers, family members, friends, doctors, and religious figures in a society where Muslim immigrants are subject to increasing state surveillance. The project underscores the central relevance of studying immigrant children's day-to-day experience and linguistic praxis in tracing how the forces at work in transnational, diasporic settings have an impact on their sense of belonging, charting the links between the immediate contexts of their daily lives and their emerging processes of identification.

1
Introduction

In late October 2005, barely two months after I arrived in Spain with my suitcases and equipment to document the sociocultural and linguistic worlds of the Moroccan immigrant children of Vallenuevo, a small rural community in the central southwest of the country,¹ riots erupted in hundreds of immigrant housing estates in France, and spread temporarily into Germany and Belgium. The rioters were not newcomers, but rather second- and third-generation immigrant youth of North African descent who had been born and raised in Europe. Perhaps because Spain is now witnessing the solid emergence of a second generation of Moroccan immigrant youth, the conflicting sentiments aroused by the 2005 events in France found a strong echo in the Spanish media, as well as in Vallenuevo, where 38% to 40% of the population has a Moroccan immigrant background.

The string of editorials about the riots that filled the Spanish press during those days emphasized the discontent of marginalized Muslim youth in Europe, as well as how these youth often felt more discriminated against and excluded from the European countries where they were born/raised than their parents' generation.² In spite of the likely relationship between these events and the structural conditions of the daily existence of these youth, the French riots in fall 2005, along with the July 2005 London bombings and the March 2004 Madrid bombings, were portrayed as the main triggers of what soon became widely discussed in the political arena as a full-blown failure of immigrant integration in Europe, or “una crisis de los modelos de integración.” Although the actual promotion of coherent and systematic policies of inclusion prior to these events is highly debatable,³ the discourse that has indeed come to dominate contemporary political discussion surrounding immigration in Spain, and throughout Europe, is that of a crisis of the politics of inclusion, especially when it comes to immigrants from North African or other Muslim backgrounds.

The feelings that the 2005 riots in France had generated in Spanish political and cultural circles also reverberated among the local, non-immigrant population of Vallenuevo. I remember vividly the first time I actually saw live images of the pandemonium that had erupted in France. It must have been the third or fourth day of the riots, since I did not have television in the apartment I had rented. That morning I had gone to the local churrería – a bar serving the traditional Spanish breakfast of fried bread – to have coffee and churros with Álvaro, a local farmer and one of my research contacts, who was going to introduce me to some Moroccan families in the town. The television in the churrería was showing the early morning news, and when the riot images of the previous night came on the screen almost everybody stopped going about their business and focused on the small monitor hung high in one of the corners of the bar. My own sense of shock at the level of violence and destruction was compounded by the comments of a few vocal patrons, applauding the actions of the French police and agreeing with the opinions of the most conservative French politicians. As I was pondering over the despair evidenced by the actions of the young rioters, and simultaneously wondering about the complex interethnic dynamics of this rural community that I was by then only beginning to discover, one of the owners of the establishment, to whom Álvaro had just introduced me, looked at me directly and said: “Hay que echarlos a todos, porque esto – esto ahora está pasando en Francia, pero esto va a terminar pasando aquí con los moros” (They must all be kicked out, because this – this is happening now in France, but this is going to end up happening here with los moros⁴).

The chilling nature of this statement, suggesting an ominous inevitability of civil unrest, renders almost invisible a question that was neither adequately posed nor satisfactorily answered by the media, politicians, and the public: how do these youth come to develop such an insidious sense of exclusion and alienation from the European countries where they were born and raised? This was a question that I thought about more and more as the weeks went on, especially in the face of political and everyday discourses that seemed to be more concerned with the emergence of headscarves and other Islamic symbols among the younger generations than with the quality of these youths' sociocultural lives.

This book is about how Moroccan immigrant children in Vallenuevo negotiate everyday forms of difference and belonging in the contemporary sociopolitical climate of Spain and, to some extent, of Europe. While current scholarship has increasingly focused on issues of belonging, identity formation, exclusion, and forms of citizenship for those whose lives are characterized by mobility and for those who have to navigate the liminality of geographical and ideological borders (Agamben 2005; Appadurai 1996; Brubaker 1992, 1998, 2001, 2004a, 2004b, 2010; Clifford 1994; De Genova 2005; Ong 1996, 1999, 2003, 2006; Rosaldo 1994, 1999; Waldinger 2001, 2008, 2010), few studies have examined how these processes emerge and unfold through everyday discursive practices and social interaction. Even fewer have focused on how children who experience migration specifically are affected by and affect these processes through their everyday participation in the multiple communities and institutions that make up their sociocultural milieus. This book attempts to provide a nuanced picture of Moroccan immigrant children's lifeworlds, by developing a holistic analysis of the constraints and affordances that this group of immigrant children routinely encounter and negotiate across the social contexts of their daily lives, including family, public school, religious institutions, medical clinics, and neighborhood peer groups.

In my examination of Moroccan children's social interactions in all these contexts, I have placed special emphasis on the multicultural politics of difference and belonging in a country, like Spain, increasingly characterized by multilingualism and cultural diversity. In showing how both social difference and commonality of belonging are products of everyday interaction, I have adopted an ethnopragmatically-informed approach, which involves the close study of everyday language use coupled with long periods of ethnographic research to investigate the ways in which speech is both constituted by and constitutive of sociocultural forms of interaction and social organization (Duranti 2007). With this approach, I examine not only the everyday ways in which Moroccan immigrant children become socially marked and discriminated against, but also how they actively and creatively respond to these practices of racialized exclusion and position themselves with respect to the multiple communities to which they can claim membership.

Spain, and Vallenuevo in particular, were interesting places to study Moroccan immigrant children's lives for several reasons. With increasing numbers of Moroccan immigrants into rural and urban Spanish centers over the last decades of the twentieth and the first decades of the twenty-first centuries, Spain has witnessed the emergence of strong North African and Muslim diasporic communities that are pushing taken-for-granted boundaries of social and institutional notions of membership and identity. The effects of these migratory trends on the demographic, ethnic, and linguistic make-up of Spanish society have generated a number of points of social and political contention.⁵ In Vallenuevo, a small rural community that in the span of a decade saw its population of immigrant origin increase from zero to 37%, these points of contention have been particularly heart-felt by both Spanish and Moroccan communities. Indeed, Vallenuevo was among the growing number of small farming communities all over the country that were rapidly becoming important centers of settlement for migrants attracted to jobs in the agricultural sector.

Ironically, some of these rural communities, like Vallenuevo, had had a long history of emigration during the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1990s and 2000s, however, they had become a prime destination for immigrants and were absorbing a large percentage of the migration flow into the country. Even so, much of the literature on immigrant communities in Spain has continued to focus on the large industrialized centers, like the areas surrounding Madrid and Barcelona (Erickson 2011; Lucko 2007; Martín Rojo 2011; Mercado 2008, etc.), and other urban spaces (see Rogozen-Soltar 2012a, 2012b in Granada). This under-attention to immigration into rural areas is also characteristic of much of the ethnographic work on North African and other Muslim immigrant communities in Europe as a whole (e.g., Bowen 2007, 2010; Ewing 2008; Mandel 2008; P. A. Silverstein 2004).

Of course, there are many important reasons to pay attention to immigration into the hyper-diverse, cosmopolitan cities of the twenty-first century. But it is also crucial to study such processes in rural areas. There are also good reasons to think that immigrants' participation dynamics will be different in smaller places, where the receiving context is often more homogenous and where the history of immigration is shallow and fast-paced, rather than characterized by longer histories of immigration and by more sociocultural, economic, religious, and linguistic heterogeneity, as in cosmopolitan cities.

Vallenuevo was also a good place to investigate the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• 1: Introduction
• 2: Moros en la Costa: The Moroccan Immigrant Diaspora in Spain
• 3: Learning About Children's Lives: A Note On Methodology
• 4: Moroccan Immigrant Childhoods in Vallenuevo
• 5: The Public School: Ground Zero for the Politics of Inclusion
• 6: Learning How to Be Moroccans in Vallenuevo: Arabic and the Politics of Identity
• 7: Becoming Translators of Culture: Moroccan Immigrant Children's Experiences as Language Brokers
• 8: Heteroglossic Games: Imagining Selves and Voicing Possible Futures
• 9: Conclusion
• Appendix 1: Working with Video-Recorded Discourse Data
• Appendix 2: Arabic Transliteration Symbols
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement