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

Suárez-Navaz, Liliana; Suárez, Iker

doi:10.1080/08865655.2022.2031254

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…This architecture of border control has contributed to the maintenance of a racially charged social and economic hierarchy. While most civil servants are white Spaniards, people working in the service sector are either Moroccans or Melillenses of Moroccan descent (Suárez-Navaz and Suárez, 2022). Until the start of the COVID19 pandemic, Melilla’s economy heavily relied on atypical commerce, a form of trade whereby goods were physically transported from the enclave to Morocco so that Spanish firms did not have to pay Moroccan customs to export into the country.…”

Section: Fencing the Southern Spanish Bordermentioning

confidence: 99%

As if there was a border. Bordering through excision in Melilla and the Canary Islands

Gazzotti

2023

Environ Plan D

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This article investigates the social life of excision at the Southern Spanish border. Scholars have documented how excision expands the border project, and how it uses the law to make it more defensible as a practice. Less attention has been paid to how excision is challenged by activist networks, and how the law is used as an instrument to un-make borders. I expand literature on the complex relation between the law and geography in bordermaking by arguing that excision is rather dynamic in nature. A comparative ethnography of Melilla and the Canary Islands reveals that de facto borders created through excision are vulnerable to legal activism. The strategic use of the law can set back the expansion of the border project, tenuously restoring some rights for asylum-seeking and undocumented foreigners. Such setbacks are tenuous because excision is, nevertheless, deeply integrated into a dense web of containment tactics. ‘The undesirables’ might thus recuperate some of their rights at one point but then still face exclusion at another point of the expanded frontier.

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Section: Fencing the Southern Spanish Bordermentioning

confidence: 99%

As if there was a border. Bordering through excision in Melilla and the Canary Islands

Gazzotti

2023

Environ Plan D

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“…The political economy of the city thus revolved around maritime and overland trade, the management of tributes required to people who wanted to trade and the regulation of mobility in and out of the exclave (Pack 2019). Even though exchange with the Berber tribes living in the Riffian hinterland was necessary to the very survival of the enclave, the foundational narrative underpinning Melilla's identity as Spanish, white and Christian revolves around its conflictual relation with the dark, violent, Muslim ‘Moors’ threatening to assault the city's fortress (Suárez-Navaz and Suárez 2022). Such racist stereotyping had a particular recrudescence with the Riffian War of 1921–1926, when the military defeat inflicted on Spain by the Riffian army at Annual transformed Abd El-Krim Al-Khattabi, the leader of the Riffian Republic, into the symbol of the ‘rebel Moor’ in the Spanish imagination (Dieste 2017).…”

Section: Race and The Making Of The Spanish–moroccan Bordermentioning

confidence: 99%

Looking into the border. Whiteness, (un)desirable encounters and research containment at the Spanish–Moroccan border

Gazzotti

2023

Libyan Stud

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How is the white researcher perceived by the border apparatus? What does this interaction say about the border itself? Ethnographic research has framed such questions as a debate on ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ in fieldwork. This is problematic, as it assumes that a researcher can really be ‘external’ to the social worlds they investigate, as if the field site existed in isolation from transnational processes of racialised extraction. This paper challenges such an assumption by arguing that the white researcher cannot be an ‘outsider’ to the North African border: they approach it as the beneficiaries of a system of colonial and capital extractivism that feeds itself through migration control. I build on Ahmed's work on white phenomenology to analyse how various border workers perceived, made sense of and reacted to my presence as a white European woman at three different sites on the Spanish–Moroccan border. I argue that the white researcher is an expected presence at the border, as the accumulated history of (post)colonial encounters leads them where others have been before. Although whiteness opens doors, only a certain kind of performed whiteness remains welcome in the borderscape. The white researcher who appears not to be aligning with or supporting the premises of migration control is perceived by border workers as a potentially disruptive presence, and contained in different ways.

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The Fenced Off Cities of Ceuta and Melilla: Mediterranean Nodes of Migrant (Im)Mobility

Ferrer-Gallardo,

Gabrielli

2023

IMISCOE Research Series

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This contribution examines the evolution of the border regime of Ceuta and Melilla since the cities joined the EU in 1986, and became crucial Mediterranean nodes of migrant (im)mobility towards the Schengen Area. The logic of border externalization has paved the way for a wide range of controversial migration control practices around the North African cities. These practices have been scrutinized from academic, journalistic and activist perspectives and their analysis has shed light, on the one hand, on the logic of exceptionality that governs the EU border regime in these cities, and on the other, on how both migrants and activists have challenged, denounced and resisted this regime, thus contributing to its constant reconfiguration. The text concludes by analyzing the consequences of two interrelated factors that have acted as vectors of change: firstly, the diplomatic-border “crisis” of May 2021, and secondly, the two years of border closure after the Covid-19 pandemic. Both factors have led to a new reconfiguration of cross-border mobility management in the region and, as the deadly events at the Melilla fence in June 2022 illustrate, to the consolidation of Spanish-Moroccan operational cooperation which entails the recrudescence of migratory obstruction practices at the EU external borders.

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

Cited by 3 publications

References 15 publications

As if there was a border. Bordering through excision in Melilla and the Canary Islands

As if there was a border. Bordering through excision in Melilla and the Canary Islands

Looking into the border. Whiteness, (un)desirable encounters and research containment at the Spanish–Moroccan border

The Fenced Off Cities of Ceuta and Melilla: Mediterranean Nodes of Migrant (Im)Mobility

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