Paper short abstract:

Our paper discusses how Moroccan immigrant women in rural Spain (la Ribera, Navarra) represent themselves and their lives in private and public spaces in both Spain and Morocco and how they envisage their spaces in gendered terms.

Paper long abstract:

The recent waves of migration from Africa and the Middle East to Europe have given rise to an ample volume of research in various areas of research. However, such studies tend to focus on members of the active population, mainly men, and young people in full-time education, probably because of the relative ease of contacting these groups. Despite the considerable presence of women in the migrant population, they tend to be less visible and have attracted less research attention. However, this invisibility suggests that female migrants have greater difficulty accessing public spaces, and are accordingly less integrated into European societies. This problem seems to be particularly acute among women from the Muslim world, where various factors seem to hinder them from participating in the workplace and interacting with other members of the local society. In this paper we redress this balance by using data from interviews with Moroccan women living in the rural Ribera area of Navarra, Spain. The interview data were obtained in the course of a larger project dedicated to the identities and situation of Moroccan immigrant women carried out in collaboration with the Regional Government of Navarra. Our analysis proceeds from a consideration of the way these women represent themselves and their lives in space. We then approach the interview material to examine how these women presented themselves and their lives as extending over private and public spaces, in both Spain and Morocco, and how these spaces were envisaged in gendered terms. In our conclusions, we discuss the implications that these findings may have.