Paper short abstract:

This report explores the process of (re)constructing new social, cultural and gender identities among second generation Moroccans living in Catalonia (Spain). It highlights how minority and majority community forces are mobilised and make contact to remove barriers to belonging and social integration.

Paper long abstract:

The intensification of population movements of extra communitarian nature in South Europe and specifically in Catalonia has meant to recontextualize the meanings attributed to the own migratory processes and the building of legitimacies and membership in the new relational society scenarios. This report explores the process of (re)constructing new social, cultural and gender identities among second generation Moroccans living in Catalonia (Spain). From a transnational point of view and on the basis of the fieldwork carried out in the original and final destinations, respectively Beni Ahmed Charkia (Morocco) and l'Hospitalet de Llobregat (Barcelona), the report tries to highlight the ethnic, class and gender barriers, which prevent multiple identities among second generation Moroccans, settled in Catalonia. It also highlights how and under what integration conditions, the minority and majority community forces are mobilised and come into contact to lift limits to belonging and social integration. Family strategies and minority behaviour cannot be fully understood without considering how in these transnational areas, the power roles and the group's internal structures are modified, and how all this has a bearing on the majority's relationships in the final destination.

One of the areas where these barriers are lifted and identity strategies and social integration conditions are put to the test, is at school. Therefore the report also shows how the minority's family and community dynamics, immersed in a transnational strategy, make up this area of compulsory contact with the majority, and how the majority's educational and social influences interact with these second generation Moroccan children and their own interrelationships, modify or reproduce structures and hierarchies in an unequal social area and dilute or extend the limits and barriers to social integration.

Catalonia is becoming a leading experimentation area, in a unique case where, in the contact area with its southern border, previous experiences from other countries with a greater Moroccan immigration tradition are being put to the test. As anthropologists we can contribute to the research applied so as to prevent the reoccurrence of those previous errors, which have lead to the social fragmentation of second and third generation, Moroccan immigrants settled in Europe.