Back to the Mediterranean? Return migration, economic crisis, and contested values in Southern Spain

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article traces how Andalusian return migrants both rebuff and embrace tropes of Mediterraneanness in discussions of the ongoing economic crisis in Spain. Over the last several decades, many Andalusian Spaniards who emigrated during the Franco dictatorship have returned home. They have arrived to a region struggling with economic hardship, political instability, and a sense of marginality to Europe. Return migrants grapple with the disappointment of returning in this context by blaming Andalusia’s woes on both ‘Mediterranean’ afflictions like corruption and economic backwardness and on the influence of amoral European values. They also present themselves both as able to restore older Andalusian moral values and to instill in Andalusia the modern sensibilities they learned abroad. Their assessments of the crisis echo old anthropological tropes of ‘honor’ and ‘shame,’ not as questions of essentialized gender and kin relations, but as framings for a broader political discourse of ambivalence about being Mediterranean as something shameful and honourable visa-vis Europe. In this sense, coming back to the Mediterranean becomes a project not just of migration, but also of moral transformation in which ‘being Mediterranean’ is reconfigured.