Precarious lives, invisible deaths. A history of community funeral management among Moroccans in Catalonia

Abstract

ABSTRACT Moroccan economic migration to Catalonia began in the mid-1960s and was consolidated in the early 1990s. The history of migration is usually reconstructed on the basis of associative, cultural and religious initiatives, as an expression of a collective identity. But this history is also the result of interaction with the receiving society. This article analyses the process of community funeral management among Moroccans in Catalonia, which represented one of the first expressions of their community configuration, but which at the same time reveals the negative consideration that their presence would arouse in Catalan society. The study of the archives of the Moroccan Consulate in Barcelona allows us to reconstruct the first funerary initiatives, but also some of the situations of early racism that were already occurring throughout the 1970s and 1980s.