Paper short abstract:

My paper will focus on how tourism workers from mainly Senegal, use multimodal souvenir T-Shirts to participate in the discourse about their lives and especially their work in the Spanish tourism sector.

Paper long abstract:

201.38 km beeline separates El Arenal on the coast of Mallorca and Barcelona. Mass tourism interconnects them and brings millions of visitors to both places every year. As a souvenir and multimodal material object of tourism, the ubiquitous T-Shirt projects stereotypes and narratives about destinations and is often hostile, constructing the host as the Other at the travel destination (Storch & Mietzner 2021). Yet the T-Shirt can also be used to display political resistance and as a means of perseverance and survival in the often-precarious labor at the beach and shopping districts.

My paper will focus on how African tourism workers, especially from Senegal, use T-Shirts to participate in the discourse about their life and particularly their labor in the Spanish tourism sector.

Whether by wearing T-Shirts with prints of famous discos in the El Arenal party district to engage in conversation with potential buyers of souvenirs or by producing and selling T-Shirts with subversive language and political statements in Barcelona about migration to and in Europe. I will discuss some examples of multimodal T-Shirt prints from data I collected at the two destinations. Here I will focus not only on the text and language displayed but also on the signs embedded in the fabric.