Paper short abstract:

The aim of my paper is to study how marginal Riffian memories approach contemporary Moroccan history. Some legacies contested in Al-Hoceima through graffiti showed how they are contesting the memory of the Spanish occupation, rejecting what Riffians define as the postcolonial Moroccan occupation.

Paper long abstract:

The aim of my paper is to analyse how Riffian memory remembers the Spanish colonial past. I analysed graffiti that appeared in Al-Hoceima in 2016 as examples of contested cultural heritage that seek to make visible individual and collective actions of socio-political reclaiming, given that contested cultural heritage is a form of protest that is exercised in emblematic places. Studying contested cultural heritage from a postcolonial and decolonial studies point of view shows the weight of memories in local histories. This is the way to understand the appearance of anonymous graffiti in emblematic colonial sites in Al-Hoceima. My research suggests that Riffians accepted the Spanish colonisation and the rhetoric of Hispano–Moroccan brotherhood from the 1970s onwards in spite of the labour abuses and segregation that followed the violent pacification process, as the 2016 graffiti denounces, to challenge their current integration in the Alawite kingdom: graffiti constitute expressions of a collective reclaiming that confronts a colonised past with an uncomfortable present, inasmuch as they are actions that accept Spanish colonialism to question the current political regimes.