Work, Love, Refuge, and Adventure: Contemporary Spanish Migrants in the City of Tangier

Abstract

This paper explores the individual trajectories of contemporary Spanish migrants, who decided to live in the Moroccan city of Tangier, by describing the various motives that guide this North-South migration. The micro-sociological analysis of these journeys makes it possible to qualify the migratory factors revealed in the literature, showing that the post-2008 global economic crisis is not the only decisive factor. This paper shows that economic drivers not only should be nuanced, but also cannot be disentangled from more personal ones, such as nostalgia (or lack thereof), affective bounds, religious connections, attraction and/or repulsion for cultural otherness, transnational mobility, youth incarceration, and power relationships.