Mobility and transidiomatic practices in a tourist resort on the Costa Brava, Spain

Abstract

As globalization advances, the arrival of people from around the globe to the coastal towns of Spain for leisure purposes or in search of better work opportunities has created important niches of persons who engage in multilingual and transnational practices and who compete over the control of material and symbolic resources. Such mobile citizens have brought about deep transformations in the linguistic, social and economic configuration of Empuriabrava, a tourist resort located on the Costa Brava, Spain. A networked ethnography undertaken in 2008 over two years has yielded extensive participant-observation data, interview data for key community members and abundant documentation on Empuriabrava, all of which will be used to address how boundaries are constructed by a long-established group of northern Europeans and more recently by people from developing regions of the world, and how these communities struggle over the (re)definition of linguistic, economic and political spaces and practices within the Catalan context as a broader phenomenon.