INTRODUCTION
Perlita de Huelva's famous song, “Obrero Emigrante” (Emigrant laborer) (Reference Perlita2005 [1969]), is a 1960s ode to Andalusian (southern Spanish) labor migrants sung in the region's signature flamenco-inflected copla genre. The lyrics still play in the background of bars frequented by elderly Andalusians, cheering the figure of the emigrant: “Emigrant comrade who leaves your sun and sky … you deserve the admiration of all Spaniards for your bravery and perseverance.” The song, an enduring reminder of regional history encoded in a proud musical heritage, casts twentieth-century Andalusian emigrants as heroes deserving national recognition. In bars frequented by a younger crowd, the flamenco-infused pop band Chambao (2007) also intones themes of migration and suffering, but not that of Andalusians. Their hit, Papeles Mojados (Wet papers), urges listeners to empathize with drowning, undocumented African migrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean to Andalusia: “Many do not arrive. Their dreams sink. Wet papers, papers without owners.… Put yourself in their place. The fear reflects in their eyes. The sea has begun to cry.” Written decades apart, “Emigrant Laborer” and “Wet Papers” are both by Andalusian artists, both use flamenco to index Andalusian regional identity, and both call on listeners to take political stances on migration and suffering. But the different migrant referents of these songs reflect demographic shifts that have transformed the meanings of mobility in Andalusia over the past several decades.
For much of the twentieth century, Andalusia was understood within Spain as a regional backwater marked by poverty, stigma, and political marginality, from which desperately poor laborers fled the Franco dictatorship (1939–1975) for a better life in “Europe,” a club that did not include Spain, and certainly not Andalusia (Rogozen-Soltar Reference Rogozen-Soltar2012a). In the mid-1970s, Spain began its gradual, bumpy process of democratization, fostering economic growth that eventually made it a destination for inmigrantes (new migrants to Andalusia) who now arrive alongside Andalusian emigrantes (return migrants)Footnote 1 coming home.
In official narratives, receiving immigrants rather than sending them is proof of Andalusia's (and Spain's) movement out of the economic, social, racial, and political margins of Europe. Politicians are holding fast to this narrative, even as Spain struggles through the current economic crisis and high unemployment triggers new waves of Andalusian youth emigration among blue collar workers and highly educated professionals alike. Ignoring these nuances and declaring Spain's categorical shift from a “country of emigration” to a “country of immigration” tells a straightforward story of progress in which Andalusia and Spain have officially joined Europe. In this story, rather than migrate to Europe, Andalusians now cooperate with the European Union (EU) as members of Europe to patrol Europe's southernmost borders. These are no longer conceptually located at the Pyrenees or the northern border of Andalusia, but rather in the Mediterranean, a militarized sea space heavily patrolled by EU, Spanish, and outsourced North African and West African border police (Andersson Reference Andersson2014).
Despite its pervasiveness, few of the scholars and pundits circulating this narrative of progress have explored how the simultaneous return of emigrantes, arrival of inmigrantes, and departure of Andalusian youth are experienced and meaningfully juxtaposed by residents of Andalusia. This narrative also implicitly defines Europe as a political entity roughly coterminous with Western Europe or the EU, whereas Andalusians imagine Europe variously as a geo-cultural space shaped by shared stakes in complex, shifting categories like “culture,” “race,” “economy,” and “modernity.” My intention in emphasizing Andalusian return migration in relation to this new immigration is to bring more centrally into focus the social importance of intra-European population mobility in social constructions of “Europe” and in shaping the question of who counts as European in the first place.
My ethnographic research indicates that many Andalusians think about whether they have “become European” by comparing and contrasting their own histories of migrant suffering with those of inmigrantes.Footnote 2 My interlocutors variously defined migrant suffering as experiences of danger, the physical pain of labor, homesickness, poverty, or discrimination. Andalusians marshaled recollections of their own histories of emigration to claim legitimacy as experts about migrant suffering with the authority to judge the conditions of new immigration and inmigrantes.Footnote 3 On one hand, comparisons that cast Andalusians as Europeans vis-à-vis new immigrants can bolster a positive sense of finally having joined Europe. On the other, Andalusians’ self-perception as historically marginalized by Europe entails a sense of inferiority, but also of moral righteousness; many Andalusians see themselves as doubly oppressed, as Spaniards in Europe and as Andalusians in Spain. While nascent European belonging is an important status marker to many Andalusians, many also associate Europe with immorality because they see Europeans as “those who exploit migrants.” Thus, in their comparisons, my research participants often balance claiming a more central place in Europe for Andalusia with tactical avoidance of Europe's culpability for the mistreatment of migrants. They do so by invoking their own historically marginal status and suffering as emigrants to a Europe that did not formerly include Andalusia.
Through ethnography of these comparisons, I argue that return migrants mobilize the suffering of migration across different historical periods and variable scales of belonging to construct the political and moral limits of Europe. The meanings of suffering change with shifts in scale. This is clearest in the way emigrantes discursively map their personal experiences of migrant suffering onto the collective scale of the region in order to explain historical change in Andalusia. Emigrantes often take credit for making Andalusia more modern and European, both through their remittances and their introduction of European sensibilities and practices to the region. By taking credit for Andalusia's Europeanization, emigrantes personalize Andalusia's historical trajectory of economic growth and democratization post-1975.
Emigrantes’ historical narratives are filled with similar shifts in geographic and political scale. For instance, their talk often oscillates between Andalusia as a sub-region of Spain and Andalusia as a region of Europe. They also gloss migrant suffering differently depending on the historical period in question, the historical perspective invoked (e.g., presentist or in hindsight), and the provenance and perceived race or ethnicity of the migrants being compared. Emigrantes include themselves and inmigrantes in the shared category of “migrant,” but they interpret suffering differently for each group. For many, their own suffering ensured Andalusia's entrance into Europe, whereas the suffering of new migrants tends simply to solidify their abject difference and to confirm the European “host” status of Andalusians. Thus, even as they distance themselves from the idea of a Europe that mistreats immigrants, Andalusians use suffering to redefine the “migrant” category and articulate it with racial hierarchies of European belonging. They do so by moving discursively across historically transformed, racialized scales of identification that reconstitute Europe and Andalusia's ambivalent place within it. Yet, as I will argue in the pages that follow, this diagrammatic scheme is seldom neatly realized, in talk or in life. In the context of European crisis and new Andalusian emigration, stories of scalar and historical shift are unraveling.
TRACING RETURN
Ethnography of emigrantes brings attention to not only the role of inter-continental migration in the social construction of Europe, but also the intersection of multiple mobile groups. In recent migration research, this mix of border-crossing people includes labor migrants, global tourists, expatriate retirees, study abroad students, international volunteers, transnationally adopted children, refugees, exiles, ethnic diaspora communities, and deportees (see Armentrout Reference Armentrout2012; Berg Reference Berg2011; Boehm Reference Boehm2016; De Genova and Peutz Reference De Genova and Peutz2010; De León Reference De León2015; King Reference King2000; Leinaweaver Reference Leinaweaver2013). These alternative forms of mobility illuminate sociopolitical hierarchies that govern mobility. The multiple flows of humans across the Mediterranean, for instance, are not simply simultaneous; they define and are made in relation to one another (see Algazi Reference Algazi2005).Footnote 4 While existing literatures on return migration often focus on fraught relationships between people in sending and/or host countries,Footnote 5 the historical narratives of Andalusian emigrantes are primarily about vexed relationships with their fellow (and differently positioned) mobile population: new immigrants to Andalusia.
There are approximately two million emigrantes in Spain today, four hundred thousand of them in Andalusia.Footnote 6 Return began after the global economic crisis of the 1970s, when Western Europe closed its borders to labor migrants, and it increased again in the 1990s after Spain's transition to democracy and rapid economic growth made coming home more politically appealing and economically feasible.Footnote 7 Given discrepancies between demographers’ and policymakers’ universal models for what counts as return and definitions used by those on the move (Sinatti Reference Sinatti2015), I follow my research participants’ understanding of return migration as the movement back to Andalusia of people born in the region who left to work in other parts of Spain or other European countries. For them, labor emigration to northern Spain is not substantially different from going to Belgium or Germany. They use the terms emigrante and retornado to mean returning married couples, individuals, and adult children born to Andalusians abroad.
This study draws on ethnographic fieldwork in the capital cities and surrounding villages of the southeastern Andalusian provinces of Granada and Jaén between 2007 and 2014.Footnote 8 My main interlocutors were elderly, retired returnees who lived in low-income neighborhoods of the capital cities. Many—though by no means all—were actively involved in emigrante NGOs, either out of a passion for civic engagement, to access social services, or in search of community. Returning emigrantes I worked with were forty-five to eighty-five years old, many over fifty-five, and they socialized with one another in multiple spaces, circulating between return migrant NGOs, Casas de Mayores (senior centers), bars, and neighborhood organizations. They formed bonds through shared, often nostalgic reminiscence of pre-emigration Andalusia, migration experiences, and the challenges of return. Many were retired, subsisting on modest pensions, but others worked at least part time to make ends meet. Still others had taken on full responsibility for the care of their grandchildren since their children worked in multiple part-time jobs or underground economic pursuits, struggling amid the economic crisis.
In Granada, the main emigrante association is located in a working-class neighborhood where inmigrante residents and businesses abound. The association's office is across a public square from a Latin-American owned candy shop and adjacent to an Arab migrant-owned shawarma stand and halal grocery shop. Return migrant activities are thus geographically centered in an area where new immigration strongly shapes the urban landscape. In Jaén, the emigrante association where I worked is located more centrally, close to a touristic area of town, but the staff there make frequent visits to returnees in local mountain villages, where much of the current agricultural work in olive and fruit fields is done by North African and Eastern European migrants. Despite these shared spaces of encounter between different migrant groups, I saw little sustained contact between emigrantes and inmigrantes in daily life, with the exception of former emigrants who worked in immigrant-focused aid agencies. While research on emigrantes’ discursive comparisons of their own and inmigrantes’ experiences clearly has political implications for the treatment of new migrants to Spain—a topic I address more extensively elsewhere (Rogozen-Soltar Reference Rogozen-Soltar2012a)—their face-to-face interactions are mainly outside the scope of this article. My focus is on how, even in the conspicuous absence of direct cooperation or interaction between return migrants and new migrants, emigrantes’ discursive comparisons of migrant suffering have become the central idiom for negotiations of Andalusian regional identity and European belonging.
ANDALUSIA IS NOT EUROPE
Discussing Andalusia's emigration history has long been a key way southern Spaniards position Andalusia as historically marginal to Europe and as awkwardly or incompletely European today. When I first lived in Spain over a decade ago, I was a student with little travel experience and was thrilled to be in Europe for the first time. To my surprise, I found that apparently I was not actually in Europe, as Andalusians told me about their experiences “migrating to Europe” and referred constantly to differences between Spain and Europe. Today, older emigrantes still discuss their “time in Europe,” describing their return to Andalusia as “coming home from Europe,” or referring to relatives living in Berlin or Paris with such phrases as, “Oh, my brother and his wife live in Europe,” and “My wife and I have returned to Spain, but our children are still in Europe.”
An elderly interviewee told me that during the Spanish Civil War and postwar he was stationed with the military in Irun, at Spain's border with France, where he could look across the border and “see Europe.” When I asked why he considered Spain external to Europe, he said he could always tell by looking at the contents of the cargo train cars that moved back and forth across the tracks spanning the border. “All the machines, all the technology” were on the trains coming southbound through Irun, while, in his recollection, the only things Spain was exporting “into Europe” were “crops and some horses; that's all we had.” David Divita calls this tendency to associate Spain with “backwardness and provincialism” and northern Europe with “progress and sophistication” the “modernist chronotope” of European migration discourse (Reference Divita2014: 2).
While some of the people I worked with occasionally referred to Spain in their expression of this chronotope, the national scale is less important to them than the relationship between the subnational region of Andalusia and the supranational region of Europe. Despite long-lasting and intense efforts under Franco, and arguably since the Catholic Inquisition, to unify Spain nationally (Tucker Reference Tucker2014), Andalusians de-emphasize the nation-state in their discussions of migration and suffering. There are many reasons for this. Andalusia has a history of regional marginality that stretches back to its disproportionately long Muslim period (Rogozen-Soltar Reference Rogozen-Soltar2012b), and this status has generated a strong tradition of regional nationalism (Calderwood Reference Calderwood2014). Andalusia's especially pronounced emigration history is also important. People frequently told me that because Andalusians were often forced by political and economic conditions to seek a livelihood abroad, they were seen as less European and less advanced than people from wealthier regions of Spain. This was compounded by the fact that Andalusians emigrated not just to other European countries, but also to the more industrialized areas of northern Spain (Collier Reference Collier1997), which shored up a sense of regional difference. Andalusian anxieties about economy, emigration, and modernity echo debates about Europeanness that have long characterized the eastern and southern edges of Europe and define the marginality of the Mediterranean as a whole (Ballinger Reference Ballinger1999; Calderwood Reference Calderwood2014; Gal Reference Gal1991; Gray Reference Gray2011; Hershenzon Reference Hershenzon2014).Footnote 9
Andalusians’ sense of historical exclusion from Europe also reflects ambivalence about what Europe is in the first place. After Franco's failed policies of autarky, Spain joined the newly formed European Economic Community, which became the European Union in 1986. The creation of the Schengen zone, a European area with eased mobility across internal borders that developed starting in the mid-1980s, prompted an increased emphasis on Andalusia as a strategic border region between Africa and Europe. These political transitions have been hugely important, yet people seldom discussed European unification or Andalusia's Europeanization with me in terms of official political belonging or increasingly integrated scales of governmental and financial administration. Rather, they spoke of economic security and infrastructure, democracy and the welfare state, and the mutual recognition of cultural similarities and cosmopolitan modernity as hallmarks of Europe and European belonging.
It is these European “characteristics” that the end of emigration is supposed to index for Andalusia. Many emigrantes feel they have come home to an Andalusia that is at least becoming European. For instance, when I asked about what changes they noted upon return, many immediately mentioned infrastructure such as the modern freeway system, farming technology, and social security, along with a sense that Andalusia is now culturally modern and sophisticated. Many also spoke of having a quality of life that resembled northern Europe and of being recognized as European by northern Spaniards and northern Europeans.
In these discussions, people attributed Europeanization to their contributions as emigrants, mapping their own mobility onto the economic and political trajectory of the region. Many told me they had “built Spain,” or “saved Andalusia.” As one man, Manu, put it, “We were the ones who raised Spain up … we were the piggybanks of Spain.” These comments refer to sending remittances and purchasing homes in emigrantes' natal Andalusian villages, but also to learning to become European. Many emigrantes spoke to me of European destinations as sites of cultural education and emulation. Their memories of arrival in France, Germany, and elsewhere usually mark their hosts as sophisticated, well-off, and often just. One woman spent the bulk of an interview lauding the French state and members of the French communist party for providing her with free groceries when she arrived as a migrant. These findings are consistent with Jane Collier's (Reference Collier1997) observation that emigration northward had profound effects on Andalusian ideals of modern personhood, politics, and sociality, engendering a new, self-consciously liberal focus on personal achievement and self-discovery at the expense of values centered on duty, obligation, and communal norms.
Many emigrantes spoke of having introduced new European sensibilities to Andalusia after learning modern work habits and becoming acquainted with secular social norms, modern medicine, and democratic governance. Edu discussed the efficient organization of Germany's health care system. Raul spoke of learning about promotion through meritocracy, rather than clientelism, during his work at a trucking company in Belgium. Reina, an aging widow who had been a domestic worker, proudly told me how she was welcomed into her German employer's family orbit because she was able to adopt northern European modes of sociality. Unlike other Andalusians, she said, in Germany she was quiet, did not drink, and did not party in the streets. Here, emigrantes drew on internalized, longstanding tropes that cast Andalusians as racially and culturally marginal to Europe, to argue that they themselves had become “more European.”
Many were uncertain, however, about whether Andalusia as a whole had really become more European. Pepe, president of “Returnees” (a pseudonym), an NGO serving emigrantes, told me in an interview about his migration to Germany in the 1960s: “The differences with Germany back then were really big. Because at that time, Spain was very behind in all respects: economics, health, everything. They [Germans] were more advanced in everything…. At that time, the typical photo of a Spanish emigrant was the rural guy with a homemade cardboard suitcase, the boina [beret] hat…. I mean, we were light years behind. But today we're closer.” But Pepe's friend Joaquín was less convinced of Andalusian progress. He explained how doubts emerge upon return: “A lot of people come back from Germany or France, and they're like, ‘Wow, what problems we have here at home!’ When someone gets sick, for example, in Germany in one day you can see your primary care doctor and the next day get in with a specialist. And here, I've come back to be in my homeland, and I have to wait three months to see a doctor. And we want to be European! But European for what? To pay more, sure, but for other things, no. To see a doctor, no.” Joaquín's frustration with rising prices and taxes, which many Andalusians see as products of joining the EU and Eurozone economy, was not mitigated by an enthusiasm for European status, which he felt was still far off and, in any case, was a mixed blessing. Like Pepe and Joaquín, many emigrantes used memories of labor migration to impose social and political difference on the geographic distances they had traveled, marking Spain as having been outside of Europe and as only tenuously a member today.
THE MEANINGS OF MOBILITY IN ANDALUSIA
Andalusian articulations of the moral and political meanings of mobility intersect forcefully with questions of temporality. Like migrants elsewhere, Andalusian emigrantes tie their experiences of mobility to morally understood emotional states like hope and despair that vary across remembered pasts and anticipated futures (Pine Reference Pine2014). In many contexts of transmigration, as political circumstances shift, memories of past mobility are transformed as well (Coutin Reference Coutin2007).Footnote 10 Andalusians often spoke to me of changing attitudes toward migration, and these changes corresponded to shifts in the political and economic situation of Andalusia vis-à-vis Spain and Europe. Here, I will trace the most significant periods of mobility in recent Andalusian history, from the Franco era to the recent, crisis-driven return to emigration, with an emphasis on how Andalusians memorialize these periods today.
Emigration as Embarrassing and Educational
Many Spaniards left the country during Franco's dictatorship to find economic opportunity and political freedom abroad. But what many refer to simply as “the exodus” was not uniform across Spain.Footnote 11 The largest concentrations of emigration were from central and eastern Andalusia. Between 1940 and 1970 more than 20 percent of the region's population left, with Jaén losing 40 percent of its population from 1950–1970 (Balfour Reference Balfour and Carr2000; Rodríguez, Egea, and Nieto Reference Rodríguez, Egea and Nieto2002).Footnote 12 Andalusians left a region that suffered disproportionate losses during the Spanish Civil War, and where political and economic circumstances created hardship for the large working class (Rodríguez and Egea Reference Rodríguez and Egea2006; Suárez-Navaz Reference Suárez Navaz2004). In demographic terms, Andalusia's transition from mass labor emigration to the reception of new immigrants closely resembles trends in Portugal and Italy (Carter Reference Carter1997; Cole Reference Cole1997; Fikes Reference Fikes2009; Koven Reference Koven2013).
According to my research participants, during the mid-to-late twentieth century, Andalusians’ emigration to northern Spain and northern Europe evoked complex sentiments of lament and pride. These juxtaposed memories were intimately linked to the emigrantes’ sense that they had left their status as “labor emigrants” behind. While they considered themselves forever emigrantes, once back in Spain they considered themselves deserving of respect and better treatment because of their contributions to the region. When they described their experiences of emigration, they emphasized embarrassment about the conditions of poverty they left, and woefully recalled saying goodbye to family, food, culture, and sunshine. But when discussing Andalusian emigration as a finished project, in hindsight they emphasized the moral dignity and honor of their sacrifice, the remittances they brought home, and the “European sensibility” many felt they had attained while living in democratic Western Europe. Thus, even though he boasted about having built a home in Jaén, and about contributing to democracy there, Sergio, an imposing man with a booming voice and generally assertive demeanor, was nevertheless humble, almost passive, when explaining his emigration. “We didn't have anything and we didn't know anything,” he said of himself and his many siblings, whom his single mother could not feed. Themes of innocence, lack of knowledge, and lack of material resources were common in emigrante recollections of the Andalusia that propelled them to emigrate.
Migration as Upward Mobility
After labor emigration waned with Spain's transition to democracy and the economic boom of the 1980s, younger Andalusians with new educational and career opportunities began to discuss migrating (sometimes now simply called “moving”) to northern Europe in terms of upward social mobility. This new language may have reflected the reshaping of political boundaries within EU member states that allowed for easier movement across national borders. But people primarily emphasized the change in motives for migration, the higher levels of education attained by those leaving Andalusia, and their job prospects abroad. People no longer represented family members working abroad as unskilled wage laborers whose labor was appreciated but also indexical of regional poverty. They were now increasingly college graduates going abroad to work for international corporations or EU governing agencies, or students going to study in prestigious universities through study abroad programs.
The hit show Andaluces por el Mundo (Andalusians around the world) on Canal Sur, an Andalusian regional television station, featured documentary-style episodes celebrating Andalusians living the good life abroad, with an emphasis on career success and cosmopolitan knowledge of the world beyond Andalusia and Spain. One morning in 2009 I walked in to find unexpected commotion in the foyer of an NGO where I volunteered, which turned out to be because one of my colleagues had announced that her sister in London was to be featured on the show. There was much gasping, shrieking, and jumping for joy as she proudly recounted her sister's phone call with the big news. When the show was canceled in late 2011, a producer told the media that Andaluces por el Mundo had “showcased Andalusians’ excellence: their capacity for hard work and commitment” (Gallardo Reference Gallardo2011). These words were probably chosen with care. Invoking images of diligence and effort directly combats common stereotypes within Spain—and to some extent Europe—of Andalusians as backward and lazy, transposing older discourses of hard working laborers into a newer image of Andalusians as educated people who enter an integrated European market as equals.
It was within this context of optimism that many emigrantes described their return to Spain. Initially, return received very little public attention. Around the same time that many Andalusian emigrantes came home, Moroccan migration and then global migration became highly visible issues in Spain and Andalusia. Moroccan labor migrants had long been coming to Spain in smaller numbers, but dramatic economic growth in the 1990s turned Spain into the fastest growing destination for labor migrants in Europe, stimulating new anxieties about multiculturalism (García-Sánchez Reference García-Sánchez.2014). By the mid-1990s, Spain was abuzz with public debate about migration policy, and the government was scrambling to devise a legal infrastructure to regulate migration and control the Mediterranean border. Amid this dramatic sociopolitical transition, emigrantes were barely a blip in regional and national discussions of migration.
Emigration and Return as Crisis
Returning emigrantes have recently entered the political spotlight through the so-called “Hacienda Scandal.” In 2006, Spain's then-socialist government passed a law requiring many emigrantes to pay taxes on foreign pensions. Unpublicized and unenforced until recently, today the crisis-strapped government has instructed Spain's tax agency, Hacienda, to tax emigrantes and charge them huge fines as penalties on previous years’ pensions. According to the government, emigrantes are financial villains: they sit unfairly on pensions with unpaid taxes, while the rest of Spain goes hungry. Emigrantes, baffled, claim that they were not apprised of the new law, and were explicitly told not to declare their pensions. Emigrante NGOs and leftist political parties have vehemently protested the new measures, harshly denouncing the conservative government's austerity-focused response to the crisis more broadly. In 2015, Andalusia's socialist party leaders accused the national government of “forgetting” about the needs and accomplishments of emigrantes (El Diario 2015). The Hacienda scandal has become a crucible for public debate about economic and political responsibility and integrity writ large. Many emigrantes participated in protests at the regional and national levels in 2013 and 2014, often sporting banners with slogans like those I saw in Granada: “We are poor grandparents, not tax evaders!” (¡Somos pobres abuelos, no defraudadores!). My NGO research participants proudly showed me the hand-made replica of an old-fashioned cardboard suitcase they carried in protests as an emblem of their victimhood and sacrifice; it now sat prominently in the window of their association's office.
More broadly, the crisis generates renewed public anxiety about the topic of emigration (as unemployment spurs new waves of Andalusian departures), and about the related question of Andalusian Europeanness. Local economic woes revive old discourses of regional backwardness. In fact, EU policymakers’ crisis rhetoric has often blamed southern Europeans for living irresponsibly, which re-inscribes as natural the inequalities between northern and southern Europe that characterized mid-twentieth-century Spanish labor emigration (Narotzky Reference Narotzky2012: 628). In this context, people worry that they are once again moving away from being European, even as some have begun to question the validity of Europe as a financial and political entity.
As Narotzky and Besnier point out, economic crises described by scholars and governments as “exceptional” may be experienced by citizens as “permanent vital insecurity” (Reference Narotzky and Besnier2014: S8). For elderly Andalusian return migrants in particular, the idea of crisis was sometimes laughable. Many insisted that Andalusia had “always” been in crisis and described the present as simply the most recent moment in a long history of economic disenfranchisement. Some even positioned themselves as too wise to buy into the crisis hype, saying talk of crisis evaded recognition of earlier generations’ hardships. When I asked Emilio, a man from Jaén in his sixties, whether the current crisis affected him as a return migrant, he said things had been “really bad,” but then he snorted and asked ironically when things had ever been good, and when Jaén had ever really benefited from the “modern economy.”
What people are calling the “Hacienda Scandal” evokes longer histories of Andalusian disenfranchisement as well as a current situation in which increasingly politicized southern Europeans “reinterpret and renegotiate responsibility and blame” for the so-called crisis (Theodossopoulos Reference Theodossopoulos2013: 201). Outrage over the new tax laws and fines fits squarely within the current context of generalized Andalusian disgust with regional, national, and European Union political and financial institutions. Southern Europe's crisis has served as a catalyzing force, infusing emigrantes’ comparative narratives of migration with political urgency.
COMPARING MIGRATIONS
In contemporary Andalusia, regional histories of migration thus loom large, with elderly emigrantes as a fixture of the social landscape. Memories of emigration are central to peoples’ ideas about what it means to be Andalusian; by extension, they have become a critical means of grappling with new migration in the region. This is hardly surprising; the experiences of return migrants often become primary sites for the articulation of personal and communal morality and political worthiness (Divita Reference Divita2014; Koven Reference Koven2013; Olwig Reference Olwig2012). However, my interlocutors’ historical memories are unique in their comparative focus on the relationships between emigrantes and inmigrantes as a formative aspect of the vexed relationship between emigrantes, Spain, and Europe.
The prevalence of migration-focused historical memory even among Andalusians who never emigrated illustrates its strength. Consider the following comments from staff in a migrant aid NGO. Discussing the plight of inmigrantes, a woman in her mid-twenties who had lived all her life in Granada said, “We Andalusians were immigrants, too, you know. Everybody, and I mean everybody in Granada knows someone who migrated.” Her colleague, a middle-aged volunteer lawyer, paused in the middle of a long critique of Spain's “fortress mentality” against inmigrantes to say, “Of all people, Granadinos should understand immigrants. This desire to become hardened against poor people and people from other countries, it seems that we've forgotten that we ourselves have all been immigrants, even in my own family!” By using linguistic shifters such as “we” and “all,” these women (who had never emigrated themselves) constructed the experience of emigration as a shared Andalusian heritage with contemporary political relevance. At the same time, these shifters also hint at a collective understanding of “we” as exclusively Andalusians (who are now Europeans) in opposition to incoming immigrants who, however sympathetically “we” view them, are of another category. Such rhetoric also hints at the way Andalusians moralize about Europe in their comparisons. These women lamented that becoming European seemed to make Andalusians adopt Europe's “hardness” toward immigrants, a stance they found inappropriate based on regional history.
The idea that local emigration history gives Andalusians the authority to comment on inmigrantes is widespread. Local news coverage of migrants in Andalusia often incorporates emigrante interviewees for commentary. Newscasters discuss footage of Moroccans picking strawberries or harvesting olives, and then cut to an Andalusian return migrant who is asked about similarities and differences between the two migratory experiences. Such commentary is more than a way of conceptually linking past and present mobility or casually remarking on demographic shifts. It is a primary resource Andalusians use to claim the moral authority to judge the place of inmigrantes in the region today. Rather than subscribing to broader global discourses of human rights, European security discourses, or right-wing xenophobia, Andalusians consistently engage with new migration in terms of their own emigration experiences and their ambivalent sense of European identity.
This framing underlies the seemingly opposite assessments Andalusians make as they reason their way toward solidarity with inmigrantes, or disdain for them. When I asked Estéban, a non-migrant volunteer at a return migrants’ association in Jaén, to elaborate on his constant assertion that “we used to be emigrants, and now they are,” he said that this fact did not coherently determine peoples’ views of new migrants. Among return migrants, “There are some who are really open about the world of immigration, and then I know others who are practically xenophobes and wouldn't be caught dead even having coffee with an immigrant!” Estéban's perception of diverse, often inconsistent views matched my own observations of emigrante testimonies. Some felt that similarities between old and new migratory experiences justified empathy, others did not. Some felt that differences between their own emigration and that of inmigrantes called for sympathy (e.g., for migrants who had it worse than perhaps they themselves had), while others used different experiences to justify refusals of recognition or solidarity. Particular migratory experiences do not predict Andalusians’ political stances toward inmigrantes. It is more the case that Andalusians slot emigration histories into conversations in order to buttress whatever position they take on new immigration. Likewise, people worked both sides of the apparent opposition between being European and being a migrant. They claimed European status (and non-migrant status) in relation to their own past and an inmigrante present, yet they claimed the moral righteousness associated with migrant suffering to distinguish themselves from other (e.g., northern) Europeans.
Solidarity and Sympathy
Some emigrantes situated migrant suffering past and present in a framework of empathy, recognition, and commitment to solidaridad (solidarity). Many spoke about turning their migratory histories into a moral imperative to accept Andalusia's inmigrantes. Sometimes this involved reaching out in a concrete way, building relationships with actual migrants. This was the case for an elderly Andalusian man who stopped by a migrant social services office where I volunteered to ask how to fill out and file citizenship papers for his inmigrante girlfriend and her daughter. As he stood at the front desk, he and the Andalusian volunteers on staff mused almost nostalgically about the region's history of emigration. He said that he really wanted to help his girlfriend because he understood her troubles, having dealt with the strict rules and confusing paperwork of foreign countries during his own labor migration decades ago.
Invocations of past emigration as the basis for kindness toward inmigrantes were especially common among Andalusians working in immigrant-focused social services NGOs. At one of these organizations in Granada, I sat in one day on a long meeting with several homeless Moroccan migrant men. The staff spent the meeting with one ear listening to the migrants’ stories and the other pressed to the phone, trying to lobby various shelters for a bed for the migrants until more permanent housing could be found. After the meeting, Josefa, one of the lawyers, turned to me and asked if I had noticed her vigorous handshake with one of the men as they were leaving. I had. She explained that it was important to avoid racism toward such people, and to remember that “we” Andalusians were also emigrants, so some sympathy was in order. She went on to say that, unfortunately, in her estimation most locals would never have shaken the hand of an un-showered, homeless Moroccan migrant, but that such racism was hypocritical. More than simply decrying racism as wrong, by using the term “hypocritical” in this context Josefa obliquely referred to the racialization of migration, including both emigrantes and inmigrantes in a racialized category of mobile people. Inverting the more common pattern of positioning migrants as racially distinct from Europeans, she drew on emigration history to open up space for racial identification between new migrants and formerly emigrant Andalusians.
I also encountered arguments in favor of inmigrantes among emigrantes who had little or no social contact with migrants from outside Spain, but who nonetheless expressed concern for them, and even articulated political demands on their behalf. Pepe, the Returnees association leader quoted earlier, did so in a long discussion with me. Seated in a cubicle of the association's run-down offices, Pepe wore an outfit much like the one he had described to me as typical of 1960s-era migrants—tattered tan suit pants, a thin wool sweater, and the ubiquitous boina hat of rural Spain. His outfit and his comments seemed to perform a kind of moral authority as he distanced himself from European mistreatment of migrants. He spoke of the anguish he felt when he saw news coverage of undocumented migrants dying in attempts to cross the Strait of Gibraltar or being exploited at work because of faulty migration labor laws and immoral treatment. He first foregrounded the suffering associated with the travel routes of undocumented migration; namely, risk of death and invisibility, and then the economic suffering associated with migrant labor and pain.
When I asked him for general thoughts on migration today, Pepe jumped straight to the issue of “pateras” and “cayucos,” names for the accident-prone boats undocumented African migrants use to cross the Mediterranean to Andalusian beaches.
In my opinion, Spain can receive inmigrantes. Don't ask me how they come, because there are a lot of deaths. In particular those that come to our Andalusian coast. There are a lot of pateras and it's sad. The government should save them because, a life is a life. It really hurts to see the inmigrantes coming this way. It really makes me sad. I emigrated illegally, but it still makes me sad…. They have the same problems that we had when we went. We suffered in our bones just like them because we went to countries that weren't Spain, and it was hard.
Pepe then moved our discussion to the political, economic, and physical suffering entailed in labor exploitation. “It's a shame. I know in my town there are two Moroccan guys, and they pay them whatever they feel like, and they're working twelve-hour days on the land, and they exploit them in a way that, well, it pains me. Because I myself felt exploited too, in France and Germany. And I don't want them to suffer like I did.” Pepe's comments here seem to index pan-European discussions of migration as an abstract human rights issue (e.g., his comment that “a life is a life”), but the crux of his statement hinges on an assessment of shared experience of immoral labor exploitation.
I'd like all the inmigrantes who want to, to come here, but with work contracts so that they can earn what they deserve, because for us, there in France and Germany, sometimes they didn't give us what we deserved. I wish that somehow, in my role in the association of emigrantes, I could arbitrate this issue a little…. I think those coming today have more problems than we did. Because we, the Spaniards that went away, more or less we went with work contracts. And that's not the same as coming over in a dingy illegally. It really makes me sad.
Pepe's expressed sympathy stems from experiences of suffering and exclusion that he imagines emigrantes and inmigrantes share and from his sense that the moral conditions being created for inmigrantes by Andalusian (and broader European) society are even worse than those faced by his cohorts. While Pepe flags legal issues—work contracts or lack thereof—his comments center on emotion, continuously coming back to how immigrant deaths, labor exploitation, and pain make him feel, and drawing moral and political conclusions from his assessment of the kinds of suffering entailed in migration to Europe.
Distancing Comparisons
Other Andalusians argued that inmigrantes either do not have it as bad as they did, or that inmigrantes are an entirely new, and worse, category of person. In both of these distancing narratives, people used Andalusia's emigration history as a rhetorical device for claiming moral authority and permission to criticize inmigrantes. Distancing commentary is of course not entirely distinct from more sympathetic stances; the two can and frequently do bleed into one another. Two of my fellow volunteers at a migrant aid association offer an instructive illustration of how discourses of solidarity slip into distancing narratives. Both women were old enough to remember Andalusian emigration under Franco and were now longtime residents of the region. Claudia spoke of the Andalusian emigrantes she had seen in her native Cataluña, and Inma, a Basque woman, claimed to speak authoritatively of Andalusia based on her decades of residence there. The certainty of their commentary despite their non-Andalusian origins demonstrates the entrenched notion of Andalusia as a recent site of abject poverty in wider Spanish imaginaries of regional difference.
In a conversation about the civil war and emigration in Andalusia, Claudia and Inma conducted something of an informative presentation for my benefit as we chatted on a slow day in the NGO's front office where we attended to Moroccan and sub-Saharan African migrants.
Inma: And especially here in Andalusia, things were really bad…. Andalusia in that period, well, goodness, in the street you saw nothing but barefoot children, covered with wounds, with runny noses, I mean—
Claudia: [interrupting] Misery! And they all went to the north, all of them, to Cataluña, to the north, to work. And they lived in these conditions, well, in shacks, in hovels, it was hooorrriiiiible! And that's why when I see immigrants today, it's all relative. Before it was the people from here that had to go north to find work, and they had it so bad, in awful conditions, you can't even imagine!
Inma: Yes, total misery! Here in Andalusia there was absolute poverty. And back then, obviously, there was no social security, there was no way, the government didn't give them anything, and they were hungry for real. It wasn't like today. I tell you, you see people that come through here and it makes you sad because each one comes with their own sob story, but here in Granada, today, nobody goes hungry. There is not hunger in Granada. Because there's social security, there's support, there's this soup kitchen … and that place that gives out clothes, there's everything.
Our conversation ended when a group of inmigrante clients came through the front door.
The competing implications of Claudia's and Inma's comparisons are striking. They closely embody the pattern in which residents of Andalusia use historically based comparisons of migration to assert their own Europeanness vis-à-vis new migrants, while maintaining a sense of victimhood and blamelessness for Andalusia vis-à-vis Europe. On one hand, these women used Andalusia's postwar experience of poverty, emigration, and lack of state resources as a source of affinity and empathy with newly arriving inmigrantes, recognizing a shared experience of suffering. Yet their commentary also serves, possibly inadvertently, to delegitimize and undercut inmigrantes’ claims of suffering and victimhood by asserting that Andalusians themselves had it worse. This logic recalls negotiations of relational victimhood and social difference in other European peripheries playing host to migrants. Matei Candea has chronicled how Corsicans, whose collective identity is rooted in perceptions of marginalization by the French nation-state, refute accusations of Corsican racism toward North African migrants by dismissing these claims as yet another mainland French effort to scapegoat Corsicans themselves (Reference Candea2006). Here, Claudia and Inma refute the idea that inmigrantes suffer at the hands of Andalusians by insisting on Andalusians’ own suffering.
Claudia's and Inma's narrative reiterates the trope of Andalusians’ utter poverty and backwardness, and it includes a tale of progress. They describe Granada today as part of a welfare state replete with social security and soup kitchens. The first half of the conversation casts Andalusia as the backward cousin of the industrial Spanish north, while the second implies a sea change in Andalusian quality of life and European status, with Andalusia now shaped by the kind of democratic governance associated with Europe. Andalusians can now give aid to those who occupy the non-European “abject” position: inmigrantes. Their comments maintain a social hierarchy between Andalusians and new migrants that prevents a shared category of “migrant” from becoming real grounds for solidarity.
Inma's and Claudia's ideas were more than talk: they informed decisions about how to treat migrants who came through their association's doors. Using the predominant logic of a neoliberal politics of care, they emphasized the individual agency and responsibility of migrants over structural political and socioeconomic factors in order to depoliticize and minimize migrant suffering (see Rogozen-Soltar Reference Rogozen-Soltar2012a). For instance, some of our regular clients were migrant men who lived in squatter encampments on the edges of the city, where bus service was unpredictable and too expensive for many, making travel into the city center to the association's offices difficult. Men who arrived a few minutes before or after appointed times for classes or social worker office hours often complained that these structural factors prevented them from benefiting fully from the association's services, but Claudia did not hear these arguments. Instead, she lectured clients about timeliness, responsibility, and organization, sometimes telling North African men that they needed to adapt to European life. In a very real sense, simple discursive comparisons of past and present migrant suffering translated into concrete dramas of disenfranchisement for migrant clients.
Some Andalusians drew distance-producing comparisons with inmigrantes in harsher terms that highlight how mobility itself is conflated with racial difference and non-European status (Lemon Reference Lemon2000). Unlike Josefa, above, who used the racialization of both Andalusian emigrantes and new inmigrantes to call for solidarity, these Andalusians use a racialized discourse of migrant criminality to distance themselves from new migrants. José talked with me one day at Returnees while waiting his turn for help with paperwork to claim social security benefits. The television was on in the waiting room, and I asked him what he thought of all the news coverage of migrants arriving in Andalusia. He replied: “I mean, my family is an emigrant family. We have been emigrantes, and because of this I have a lot of respect for the immigrants that are coming here. But immigrants that come to work, you know what I mean? We don't consider them to be immigrants if they come here to be gar-, well, not garbage, because we can't say a person is garbage, but, you know, people who don't come to work, but to do damage. And there are a lot of them.” José went on to describe inmigrantes as prone to criminal activity and threatening to Andalusian public safety.
My NGO colleagues cast Andalusians as Europeans by comparing them with inmigrantes and insisting on the latter's relative lack of suffering. In turn, they attributed inmigrantes’ supposedly better living conditions to Spain's ascension to the ranks of European welfare states with resources. Their argument centered on migratory circumstances and experiences. José, in contrast, invoked distinctions between “kinds” of people, casting inmigrantes from outside Europe as morally suspect and criminal, a common trope of anti-migrant discourse that reveals the markedly racialized politics behind articulations of suffering and deservedness in the context of migration in Europe (Partridge Reference Partridge2012; Terrio Reference Terrio2009). Yet both their disavowals of sympathy toward migrants and their refusals to recognize immigrant suffering in Spain began with invocations of the emigration history of Andalusians themselves.
To some extent, Andalusians’ ideas about their own region's degree of Europeanness map onto their positions of solidarity with or distancing from inmigrantes, but not fully. Take, for instance, my NGO coworkers, who insisted that Andalusia had become part of a modern, European welfare state. For them, being European meant having the resources for humanitarian care (e.g., soup kitchens, shelters). Insisting that new migrants are well taken care of was their way of claiming European status for Andalusia. For others, like Pepe, sympathizing with the hard plight of exploited and undocumented migrants can be a way of casting doubt on Andalusia's modernity.
Yet for many Andalusians, it was precisely the ability to distinguish between their own relative well-being and the unsavory lot of inmigrantes that made them feel finally more European. If their own history involved suffering as migrants at the hands of Europeans, seeing inmigrantes now take up the position of those who migrate and suffer vividly confirmed a sense of Andalusia's arrival in Europe. As Ana, the proprietor of an international aid nonprofit explained matter-of-factly, “Look, that's how it is. Immigrants have the worst jobs, the lowest paying jobs. We used to have them and now they do. That's always how it goes.” Ana's progress narrative illustrates how, despite the reservations of some about Andalusia's real degree of Europeanness, belief in a transition from sending to receiving immigrants (and thus from experiencing migrant suffering to remotely observing the suffering of others) marks the conceptual movement of Europe's periphery from Andalusia to the Mediterranean Sea.
For Inma and Claudia, Europe was unquestionably a good place to be, both for Andalusians as members and inmigrantes as hosted labor. Pepe's anxiety about Andalusia not quite reaching European status contains a critique of European morality. For Pepe, Andalusia's failings as a so-called European host reveal the wider failures of Europe to live up to its promises of humanitarian treatment of migrants. These moral evaluations of Europe are temporally bound ways of normatively framing the kinds of relationships Andalusians should seek or expect to have with inmigrantes. In some cases, Andalusians seem to believe that their region's experience of progressing toward Europe after decades of emigration obliges them to remember their past suffering and to respect and help those now in the suffering migrant position. In other cases, narratives of historical progress serve to naturalize inmigrantes’ suffering as inevitable; it is simply their turn to enter the “immigrant slot” (Silverstein Reference Silverstein2005). The question of migration, including who counts as a migrant, and how, is thus central to new geopolitical, cultural, and moral delineations of Europe, Europeans, and Europeanness.
LEAVING AGAIN?
On my first visit to a return migrants’ association in Jaén, the first person I met was Tina. A young woman in short cutoff jeans and a purple tank top, she carried what looked like an old-fashioned trapper keeper. As I thought to myself that she was not the demographic I had expected to meet at the organization, Tina nervously asked if I was also there for language classes. I explained my research project, and Tina's eyes lit up with fascination. There was a lot to tell about migration these days, she said, and launched into her own story. Tina was coming to the return migrants’ association for French lessons. Fed up with unemployment since graduating college, she was learning French in the hopes of emigrating. Ideally, she would love a job in a proper company, but given the state of things in Andalusia, she would be perfectly happy picking grapes or doing other agricultural jobs in France. Did I know of any work she might do, or even unpaid internships in the United States?
Today, emergent demographic shifts are once again complicating the picture of intersecting mobilities in Andalusia. Despite the temporal optimism entailed in Spain's shift from emigration to immigration, the ongoing economic crisis is sending many Andalusians, as well as other Spaniards, in search of labor opportunities abroad (Roseman Reference Roseman2013). With youth unemployment rates in Andalusia hovering around 62.2 percent (ABC 2014), many young people are preparing for immanent labor emigration, something that as children they imagined safely consigned to their region's history. Many elderly emigrantes have grandchildren now preparing to leave Andalusia. In the summer of 2014, NGOs set up in the early 2000s to cater to elderly return migrants were spending at least half of their financial and human resources on programs to prepare young Andalusians for emigration.
Members of all generations described this state of affairs to me using two often-repeated phrases: “going backwards” and “a lost generation.” Spaniards in their twenties and thirties have taken to the streets in Andalusia and the national capital of Madrid in recent years, carrying protest banners with slogans such as, “We aren't going [voluntarily], they're throwing us out!” and “Exile!” and “Class Fight!” (Juventud Sin Futuro 2016). These are rallying cries of the new activist group Juventud Sin Futuro (Young people without a future). They charge that the conservative Popular Party government's austerity measures contribute to youth unemployment and directly cause the current need to emigrate. The group's critiques of the government parallel the moral outrage of emigrantes’ “We are poor grandparents, not tax evaders” campaign. Thus, even as some Andalusians begin to position themselves as solidly European in the face of the new, global migratory influx to Spain, their rhetoric highlights a sense of victimhood and marginality with respect to Europe, made all the more powerful in the current context of economic vulnerability and a new generational cycle of Andalusian labor emigration.
This renewed emigration adds novel dimensions to Andalusians’ ambivalence about the linked questions of population mobility, human suffering, and the moral politics of European membership. For some, it provokes a sense of moving backward, of regressing from a perceived trajectory of Europeanization. In this view, youth poverty and emigration signal the undoing of Andalusia's European project. For others, new emigration shows up the previous exuberance for Europe as a big lie, or a false hope. Yet many still hold fast to a narrative of progress for Andalusia, even as they feel it slipping out of reach. This complexity may be clearest in the way old and new emigrantes both support and criticize one another. I often heard elderly returned emigrantes compliment the educational background of Andalusian youth, referring to them as “very well-educated” and “accomplished.” Yet elderly return migrants were also worried that youth might be too spoiled and “soft” to succeed “in Europe,” often citing cases of university graduates who emigrated but returned after only a few weeks because they could not stand the work, or were duped into signing false contracts because they were naive. Young people like Tina looked to the elderly (sometimes to their own grandparents) for wisdom, relying on their emigration experience to inform their own plans. But new emigrants also railed against older generations for having failed to secure European status for Andalusia and Spain and for not safeguarding the economy.
Most commentary I heard, however, was aimed at the Andalusian and Spanish government for corruption and an ineptitude that it was felt keeps Andalusia and Spain outside the economic and political center of Europe. Estéban, the volunteer at Jaén's return migrant association, summed up the sentiment of many when he said, “You could see it coming. I saw it coming, and I'm no luminary! Of course the government should have known that the housing bubble would explode. And it exploded! And now, it's impossible. We spent thirty years training people to work in construction and now there is nothing.” Others express a simultaneous concern that having become European might itself be what is causing the current crisis, and that the political configuration of the Eurozone and Spain's membership in it are to blame for national and regional woes. For these Andalusians, two central frustrations are EU calls for Spanish austerity measures and the pressure the EU places on Spain to patrol the Mediterranean border on behalf of Europe, but without proffering the necessary support for border control. I have argued that many Andalusians want to join Europe but also to retain a sense of moral innocence with respect to continental mistreatment of immigrants. Confronting the ongoing economic crisis in 2014, Andalusians expressed to me a related concern: they felt they were being forced to shoulder the crucial responsibility of securing Europe's borders without fully enjoying the benefits of core membership.
In this context, claims to the ownership of migrant suffering are transitioning as more Andalusians come to see regional suffering as a contemporary problem and not something associated with a closed history of emigration. NGOs set up to aid inmigrantes, for instance, increasingly receive calls from non-migrant Andalusians who are outraged that, in a time of scarcity, resources are flowing to “outsiders” rather than to “us,” employing moral judgments that revive discourses of Andalusian suffering and need. As early as 2009, when I served as secretary for a migrant aid NGO while conducting research, I began receiving multiple, daily phone calls from Andalusians asking about job training and financial aid programs. When I explained that we were limited by our funding, which was subsidized by the regional government and allocated exclusively for the incorporation of inmigrantes, callers yelled at me about the injustice of that policy given their “own suffering” and the fact that Andalusians were being forced to leave again, a tack I had not heard in previous years. Anxiety about renewed Andalusian emigration and a general sense of economic strain are clearly reshaping the kinds of comparisons people make between emigrantes (old and new) and inmigrantes.
CONCLUSION
“I'm from Granada, but I'm also Catalán now. They accept me there.” This assertion of dual belonging came from an aging pensioner in June 2008. He struck up a conversation with me as we waited for an intercity bus to arrive. It would take us back to the capital city of Granada from the dry, dusty red Alpujarra Mountains in the interior of Granada province. He pointed out the rooftop of the house he was renovating. Years of working in Cataluña had earned him the resources to improve on his natal home in this mountain village, which he visited more often now that he was retired. He seemed to take great pride in informing me that, despite loving Andalusia and longing to return permanently as many of his peers were doing, he felt very respected in Cataluña, where he and other Andalusian emigrantes had contributed so much to the economy and where he had learned to speak the Catalán language.
The roof of his house-in-progress stood slightly higher than the neighboring homes. Most of the houses in the village conformed to the white-walled, flat-roofed, Moorish architectural style that is shared by the towns built into the nooks and crannies of these Alpujarran mountainsides and their counterparts, the Moorish-built villages of North Africa, its shores visible across the water on especially clear days. Earlier that morning I had watched Moroccan migrants trek quietly across a town square in this village, possibly on their way to work in the fields. Another Moroccan had sold me a trinket for my mother in one of the many Alpujarran tourist souvenir shops. Locals told me that more and more Moroccans were working the fields in their town; along with Andalusian emigrantes, these inmigrantes were slowly reviving a population decimated by mass emigration decades earlier. Andalusian return migration, immigration from the global south, and new Andalusian emigration are reshaping the social landscapes of the region. While scholars have yet to pay much ethnographic attention to this intersection of mobilities, Andalusian residents themselves are keenly aware of it. Emigrantes and other Andalusians are making sense of their own history by remembering it in relation to new migratory flows, and vice versa, always with an eye toward processes of Europeanization and the question of belonging at the margins of Europe.
In this article, I have argued that in comparative narratives of migrant suffering, Andalusian return migrants harness the discursive power of transitioning between various scales of belonging and distinct temporal frames in order to make moral claims about Europe and the scope of European inclusion and exclusion. Specifically, my interlocutors map their personal experiences of emigration onto the collective, regional story of Andalusian modernization and Europeanization. This scalar toggling allows them to legitimize their evaluative comparisons with new inmigrantes and new emigrants, as well as their ambivalent moral assessments of Europe as both a still-desirable club and a failed promise. The process is shaped by broader conversations about the ongoing economic difficulties faced by southern Europe and public debates about assigning blame and victimhood in this context. Historically positioned as non-European migrants to Europe, many Andalusians strive today to embody a more centrally European economic, racial, and political status vis-à-vis inmigrantes while also evading blame for European mistreatment of migrants, thereby safeguarding what they consider the morality of their peripheral regional history. Meanwhile, they anticipate Andalusia's potential, crisis-induced backslide out of Europe once again.
Ethnography of this complex process highlights the hegemony of the idea of Europeans as hosts but also points to emergent political possibilities for uncoupling the perceived links between European identity and non-mobility, or between migration and non-European status. Today, Europe's newly appointed southern members have begun to emigrate again, and to loudly denounce their own suffering in the process, but this time as people who are—albeit tenuously—recognized as part of Europe. Along with renegotiating the boundaries of what (and who) counts as European, some Andalusian return migrants are creating opportunities for the inclusion of new migrants by expressing solidarity with them, a sentiment that is grounded sometimes in perceived sameness and at other times in the perception of difference.
In a different Mediterranean context, Naor Ben-Yehoyada has traced how Italians and North Africans employ a kinship-based political discourse of affinity across difference, rather than solidarity based on shared descent or sameness (Reference Ben-Yehoyada2014). The Andalusians I worked with differ: they take migration as the most important medium in deliberations of political solidarity. Yet they remind us of Ben-Yehoyada's observations because, while comparison across migrant groups can be a source of anxiety, sameness is not always required for solidarity, nor does it guarantee it, and difference does not always foreclose solidarity. Combined, these cases point to a certain Mediterranean ambivalence about the relationship between similarity and political solidarity, and a willingness to engage in empathy across difference that may depart from the more homogenizing demands found elsewhere in Western Europe (Fernando Reference Fernando2014; Partridge Reference Partridge2012).
Migration is widely understood as a phenomenon that will make or break the European Union. As the recent Syrian refugee crisis painfully reminds us, debates among EU nations about their respective capabilities and responsibilities for hosting migrants and refugees continue to push migration toward the center of moral politics in Europe. Yet the question of what migration portends for European Union cohesion, for the perceived boundaries of European cultural identity, and for the stakes of claiming European belonging, goes far beyond the influx of migrants to Europe from elsewhere. Intra-European migration has long been central to the “Europe question,” and scholarly formulations for analyzing the co-production of Europeanization and migration patterns must take into account the complex and historically shifting relations between multiple migratory populations whose members may define themselves in relation to one another as much as to home or host societies.
This article opened by citing a common scholarly and political refrain: namely, that Andalusia has transitioned from a region of emigration to one of immigration. This official narrative may soon need changing to account for new demographic trends. Perhaps in five years politicians and pundits will speak instead of Andalusia's transition from emigration to immigration and back again, the new clause accounting for return migration to Andalusia, Andalusians’ recent return to emigration, and the projected return of at least some inmigrantes to their countries of origin as jobs for them in Spain dry up (Bastia Reference Bastia2011). Andalusians’ ideas about migration and suffering will likely remain a key locus for refiguring ideas about European belonging and the moral limits of Europe, but probably not in the straightforwardly teleological way that most political commentary would lead us to expect.
