Spanish Migrants Research Articles

Numeracy selectivity of Spanish migrants in colonial America (sixteenth–eighteenth centuries)

AbstractSince the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the so‐called New World in 1492, hundreds of thousands of Spaniards settled in Central and South America. This paper assesses the skill selectivity of Spanish migrants who went to Hispanic America during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries for the first time. The age‐heaping method is employed to estimate numeracy levels as a proxy for human capital. With a database of 33 929 individual observations, the findings show that Spaniards who left the country to settle in the Spanish territories were positively self‐selected. Additionally, differences are observed in the human capital of those who chose to settle in Mexico, who had a higher level of numeracy, than those who chose Peru. These differences might be due to the viceroyalty structure and educational institutions that encouraged the emigration of people with greater human capital to Mexico. Finally, when the level of numeracy of Spaniards in Hispanic America is compared with the numeracy of the total population, emigrants still had higher levels of human capital.

Belonging here and there: How social media affect the transnational lives of Spaniards in Iceland

Following the economic crisis of 2008–2014, the number of Spaniards in Iceland has quintupled. This study explores how young, highly qualified Spanish migrants in Iceland adopt social media to become embedded in Iceland and to maintain relationships in Spain, and how it affects their sense of belonging. For this aim, semi-structured interviews were held in 2017–2018 with 29 Spaniards residing in Iceland, and their personal networks were analyzed. We found that migrants who felt they belonged to both Spain and Iceland had more social relationships in Iceland and used more social media platforms to sustain their local and transnational networks compared with migrants who felt they belonged nowhere or only in Spain. Not only did they extend their repertoires with new social media, they also adapted how they used platforms to the media environment in Iceland. In this way, social media facilitated a sense of local and transnational belonging.

Analysing Power Relations among Older Norwegian Patients and Spanish Migrant Nurses in Home Nursing Care: A Critical Discourse Analysis Approach from a Transcultural Perspective.

Power relations in care are the link between patients and nurses regarding communication and the ability to act in this context. It can be affected when there is cultural interference between members, putting mutual understanding at risk in healthcare situations. This study analyses power relations in healthcare situations between older Norwegian patients and Spanish migrant nurses regarding active listening, shared decision-making, and patient participation. We performed a hermeneutical study endorsed in critical discourse studies framework from a transcultural perspective. A purposive sampling included older Norwegian patients living alone and Spanish migrant nurses working in Norway. Eleven face-to-face semi-structured interviews were conducted with older patients and four via videoconference with migrant nurses. The analysis followed hermeneutic considerations by Crist and Tanner, and linguistic analysis was performed. Shared decision-making and active listening situations sometimes showed a power imbalance that negatively influenced older Norwegian patients. However, Spanish migrant nurses were also conditioned by care organising institutions. This power triangle negatively affected the relationship between the older patients and migrant nurses, resulting in a lack of communication, personnel, time and trust. The migratory experience influenced the care provided by Spanish migrant nurses, shaping a series of cultural competencies acquired through the migratory process.

Emotions and Migration in Argentina at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

This book is about failed marriages and how migration played a role in their failure. It is a translation of a 2019 book titled Lazos rotos: La inmigración, el matrimonio y las emociones en la Argentina entre los siglos XIX y XX. Narrower than its English title suggests, the book focuses specifically on cases of marital conflict that found their way into the judicial record, including bigamy, domestic abuse, murder, and adultery (real or imagined). Migrating might not lead to a greater proportion of failed relationships (and their related crimes), but as María Bjerg shows, it added unique pressures, ones that sedentary people did not have. The book draws from about 25 court cases from the city and province of Buenos Aires between 1880 and 1905 as well as newspaper accounts of the plaintiffs, defendants, and victims. Migration is central to all these cases. Strains brought by a significant period of separation (several years) before a couple was reunited were a significant factor in all disputes. Feelings of alienation in a new society also loomed over these unhappy denouements. Many of the crimes took place in the conventillos (tenement housing) of Buenos Aires, and the tight living quarters and the prying eyes and ears of neighbors fueled discovery and appeared in court testimonies and newspaper accounts.The cases of bigamy were particularly striking. Bigamy here refers to men remarrying in Argentina while having an estranged wife across the ocean. Bjerg uncovers several instances of married men leaving behind wives (and sometimes children), nominally with the shared decision that the woman would later follow. Yet in these cases, absence did not make the heart grow fonder, and sometimes the man grew more distant or entirely silent in epistolary exchanges or the woman refused to uproot her life and resettle in Argentina. In court, some men successfully argued that so much time had passed (as much as a decade) or that the wife disobediently refused to follow that they were entitled to remarry and start anew. That such arguments worked in some instances reveals much about the importance of class, gender, and the malleability of the law. Other men, such as Domingo DeBartolo, were sentenced to 4.5 years in jail. In these cases of bigamy and in others of adultery and murder, Bjerg exposes the varied meanings and double standards that applied to male and female honor at the turn of the twentieth century in Argentina.Bjerg draws exclusively from cases involving Italian and Spanish migrants, and the author notes that archival records in Argentina suggest that rural Germans and Danes or urban Jews settled marital conflict differently (p. 123). More theorization or reflection on these archival absences or the incorporation of further research in the revised English book could have been illuminating. That Italians and Spaniards comprised 75 percent of the foreign nationals in the country (according to the 1914 census) does not explain why they make up 100 percent of the court cases related to abuse, murder, adultery, and bigamy. Did factors relating to longer separations and a trailing spouse, compared to those relating to more family-centered migration, lead to greater strife for the few dozen Italians and Spaniards who appear in this book? Were there cultural, religious, or community factors that kept marital conflict out of the public eye (whether through preemptive conflict resolution or hiding)? If other groups are not in court cases, are there other ways to talk about emotions as they relate to migration (such as hope, nostalgia, nationalism, love, boredom, sadness, disdain, etc.)?The focus on migration-specific issues that affect emotions offers a fascinating contribution to both the history of emotions and the history of migration. As Bjerg notes, these cases reveal the “heavy emotional toll of migration” and expose the flip side of standard accounts of people living or embracing transnational lives (p. 2). This book reminds us of some of the ways that separation, epistolary relationships (including when illiteracy was an important factor), and emotions suffered as the result of that same transnationalism. This book examines the final breakdown of marriages, but it offers a potent reminder of how multiyear separations put strains on all relationships and how everybody involved in migration works “to reestablish the affective bond and rekindle the language of love and the intimacy of conjugal life” (pp. 45–46). With its focus on emotions, this book proposes a series of new methodological questions, and historians of migration and of Latin America more broadly will find that Bjerg's work offers many new angles to approach well-studied topics.

Dual‐career Spanish couples in Europe: Work‐family balance in childcare

AbstractThe article explores the childcare arrangements made by Spanish migrants in Belgium, Germany and the United Kingdom. The research is based on semi‐structured interviews conducted after an exploratory survey. The respondents, mostly women with university degrees, had engaged in intra‐European mobility between the economic recession of 2008 and the health crisis of 2020. In the narratives, women in dual‐career couples with young children reflect on how approaching work‐family balance depends on receiving social, institutional and family support. In addition, gender expectations affect negotiations around the sharing of roles and responsibilities in different‐sex couples. Interviewees underline that the gender divide persists or is even reinforced in relation to employment and technological change. Non‐standard and ‐flexible jobs, little access to services or incompatible teleworking with children at home reveal the fragility of care and welfare regimes and, consequently, the limited ability of couples to find satisfaction in the search for a work–family balance.

Online musicking for humanity: the role of imagined listening and the moral economies of music sharing on social media

AbstractMusic sharing on social media increasingly involves ‘imagined listening’, a form of sociality based on how we think that others listen to music (as well as on our own imagining of sounds) and typically mediated by the exchange of visual prompts, such as the thumbnail images associated with a particular streaming link or recording. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted online and offline with Spanish migrants in London, I show how practices of music sharing based on imagined listening articulate specific moral economies. In these economies, users imbue the sharing of music with positive value, as something that contributes to human flourishing and balances the negative aspects of social media and the world. I also consider how users reckon with the algorithmic manipulations of social media platforms and the fleeting forms of user engagement characteristic of an online world in which there is more music than could ever be heard.

Dreams of Development in Mexico and Spain: A Comparative History of Guestworkers and Migration Diplomacy

AbstractThis history of Cold War-era migration policy compares two emblematic guestworker programs that recruited several million Mexican and Spanish migrants to labor in the United States and Germany. Proponents of the bilateral accords defended them as diplomatic achievements that secured contractual labor rights, improved foreign relations, and sent migrants home with savings and skills to achieve the diverse development goals of the sending states. The study traces the programs’ historical and ideological roots, juxtaposes the guestworkers’ experiences, and uses the cases of Mexicanbracerosand Spanishgastarbeiterto explore the contested nexus between migration and development.

Gender and the Role of Emotional Regulation in Intercultural Communication

This article addresses the question as to why female migrants are more negatively affected than male migrants when confronted with unfamiliar traits in communication in the host country, but they are nevertheless more willing to adapt to the foreign style of communication. To answer this question, the different management of emotional regulation (Thayer et al. 2003) by both genders was investigated. A broad survey conducted among Spanish migrants in Germany led to the conclusion that the female migrants actually perceive the investigated traits more frequently and are also more negatively affected by them. But, in comparison to the males, they have an increased ability to recognize and understand their emotions although they also display an increased tendency to ruminate. However, most of the women counteracted this tendency with a heightened ability to regulate their emotions through antirumination emotional repair strategies. According to the data, this abilityseems to lead to a greater willingness to understand the views of the natives and thus possibly to being more disposed to integrate into the host society.

The Role of Resilience for Migrants and Refugees' Mental Health in Times of COVID-19.

Migrants and refugees need international protection, particularly during a crisis such as the current health pandemic. The aim of this research was to examine the mental health and attitudes towards COVID-19 in migrants and refugees compared to the general Spanish population. Moreover, the nature of resilience was examined as a mixed component though life experiences. For this proposal, an interview was carried out in a sample of 245 participants who volunteered to participate in the study. The sample was divided into Spanish non-migrants, Spanish migrants, non-Spanish migrants and refugees. Attitudes towards COVID-19, resilience (based on BRCS) and mental health (based on DASS-21) were measured. The results obtained can be described as follows: (i) Migrant participants indicated worse mental health than non-migrants, and within the migrant group, refugees presented worse scores; (ii) No differences were found in attitudes towards COVID-19 in any of the subgroups; (iii) A moderating effect of group was found for the relationship between resilience and mental health but not between resilience and fear of COVID-19. These results might be of great interest in making visible the vulnerability of migrants and specifically refugees, and the proposal of intervention programs based on resilience training.

Our Life Is Not Here: Migration and Return of Young Spaniards Living in Chile

With the aim of understanding the recent migration processes of young Spaniards settled in Chile, the present paper analyzes, on the one hand, how these young people experience their arrival and establishment in said Latin American country and, in the other hand, how the process of returning and readjusting to Spanish society takes place. For that, and following the procedures of the Grounded Theory, the discourses of 37 Spanish migrants obtained through in depth interviews were analyzed: 22 of them are living in Chile and the other 15 returned to Spain after spending a long period in Chilean society and have been living in Spain for at least one year since then. All of them have university degrees, are between 25 and 35 years old, and arrived in Chile between 2013 and 2018. This qualitative study shows the way in which these migrants experience their sociocultural integration in Chilean society, which could be typified as “nostalgic” since it is characterized by the idealization of and the longing for their society of origin. Another key characteristic is the eventual return to the country of origin, in which the desynchronization they experience is especially remarkable: after a long period abroad, they feel disconnected from the transformations that have taken place in their original environment, which leads them to experience a difficult process of readjustment to Spanish society that sometimes is even more complex than that experienced abroad.

Labour and Technology Migrations in the Iberian Peninsula — The Case of the Spanish Millano Family’s Woollen Mills in Portugal (Late 19th–Early 20th Century)

ABSTRACT This article studies three woollen mills (Torre de Moncorvo, Trás-os-Montes and Vila Nova de Gaia/Porto) built in the north of Portugal from the second half of the 19th to the early 20th centuries, by a family of Spanish migrants, the Millanos. The circumstances of this family’s migration, its impact on the local communities and even the location and description of their mills were barely known at the beginning of this work. Thus, this article sheds new light both on the location of Millanos’ mills in Portugal and on their morphological and technological configurations. Various techniques were combined, including GIS technology, aerial photography analysis, documentary research and archaeological field survey to explore new paths of research in industrial archaeology that let us offer a more global perspective of the mills and their social and historical context.

Disreputable Spaniards Versus Middle‐Class Limeños: The Coloniality of Speech in Lima, Peru

At the height of the Spanish economic crisis that began in 2008, tens of thousands of Spanish migrants and Peruvian return migrants moved to Peru following openings in an unprecedentedly promising Peruvian job market. Tensions ensued; colonial history came to be more actively discussed by locals as the number of Spanish businesses increased. This article shows that extant notions of “local” and “foreign” emerge from sets of complex characterological figures defined by sign‐clusters that index “Peruvianness” and “Spaniardness,” developed to uphold middle‐class speech practices as quintessentially Peruvian. Three features are explored: excessive volume, the presence of the phoneme /θ/ in speech, and the perceived excessive use of expletives. Enregistering these features as “foreign,” middle class, nonmigrant Limeños sought to match their actualized upward mobility within the space of the city to the world stage, but in doing so, they ironically repurposed colonial forms of respectability to criticize the behaviors of Spanish migrants and return migrants who they found to be tainted by Spaniardness. This case demonstrates that while the specific colonial aspirational horizon (i.e., directly copying the metropole) may be gone, its ethos remains moored to nationalized ideologies of propriety, respectability, and class distinction.

La herida racial en Francisco Moscoso Puello: la angustia del mulato

Francisco Moscoso Puello (1885-1959) es un notable médico dominicano de la primera mitad del siglo xx. Hijo de migrante español y negra dominicana, escribió una serie de obras que influyeron en su momento a la sociedad letrada de Santo Domingo. Cultivador de diversos géneros, su práctica de escritura estuvo permeada por la búsqueda incesante de lo que llamó el alma o el carácter nacional del pueblo dominicano. Regularmente se le coloca dentro del pesimismo dominicano, corriente de pensamiento decimonónica que miró con desdén nuestra composición social y/o racial. En este caso, quien escribe es un mulato que reconoce la composición demográfica de este mestizaje entre blanco español y negra africana; pero su ideal de civilización es la blanquitud europea como la entiende Bolívar Echeverría. A partir del método hermenéutico ideado por Stephen M. North y aplicado a un corpus literario importante, se resume en este trabajo lo que hemos llamado la conciencia escindida o la angustia del mulato. Encontramos que, influenciado por el determinismo geográfico y racial propio a las ciencias sociales del siglo xix, Moscoso Puello realizó una práctica escrituraria con la intención de sobrellevar la angustia existencial de ser un mulato en un país mulato; aunque no como todos los mulatos dominicanos dado su acercamiento privilegiado con el mundo europeo a través de su formación académica.

The gender gap in the biological living standard in Spain. A study based on the heights of an elite migration to Mexico, 1840-1930

This paper examines the evolution of the statures of Spanish male and female migrants who entered Mexico between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth century. Using the information contained in the National Registry of Foreigners created by the Mexican government, the paper also estimates the evolution of the gap between male and female migrants’ heights. The inclusion of women and their heights in the registry allows the estimation of both male and female heights and the analysis of their evolution for a group of comparable individuals. The results show that Spanish migrants to Mexico grew taller between 1840 and 1930, and also reveal their character as a highly qualified group, with heights similar to those of the Latin-American elites and considerably higher than the statures of those who remained in Spain. In the long term, the differences between men and women decreased from more than 10 cm in the cohorts born in the mid-nineteenth century, to around 8–9 centimetres in the early twentieth century, coinciding with a period of profound economic and social transformations.

Exhuming Labor: Alienation and Rural Affiliation in Spanish Migrant Poetry

Exhuming Labor: Alienation and Rural Affiliation in Spanish Migrant Poetry

Memory and migrant solidarity in Icíar Bollaín’s En tierra extraña

ABSTRACT Icíar Bollaín’s 2014 documentary, En tierra extraña, represents the experiences of Spaniards who have emigrated to Scotland in the wake of the financial crisis. Following the onset of the crisis in 2008, unemployment rates in Spain reached unprecedented heights, and since then increasing numbers of Spaniards have elected to search for employment opportunities abroad. By relating their experiences, En tierra extraña suggests that this contemporary wave of emigration is the result of Spain’s failure to establish a democracy free from the legacy of the Franco dictatorship. The film puts the experience of twenty-first-century Spanish migrants in dialogue with the history of Spanish emigration of the 1960s under the Franco dictatorship and more recent immigration to Spain beginning in the 1980s. This article focuses on the film’s use of memory and makes two arguments. First, that the film strives to engage the audience in its political project by drawing an empathic comparison between current Spanish emigration and that which occurred during the 1960s. And second, that the film’s less explicit aim of encouraging empathy for contemporary African and Latin American migrants in Spain by comparing them to Spanish emigrants overlooks the ways in which the former group’s experiences are conditioned by questions of race and legal status.

Jordi Puntí’s Els castellans: Reshaping Catalan narratives of immigration and integration

Acclaimed Catalan writer Jordi Puntí’s fictional memoir Els castellans (2011) offers an important contribution to contemporary debates on immigration and national identity in Catalonia. Set in the 1970s in the small industrial city of Manlleu, this collection of semi-autobiographical vignettes about two rival groups of boys narrates not only Puntí’s adolescence, but also provincial Catalonia’s struggle to integrate large numbers of working-class Spanish migrants who arrived to the region in the mid-twentieth century. Els castellans is groundbreaking in its literary telling of the experience of the 1950s–1970s migratory wave from a Catalan-identified point of view. Adopting a geographical approach to examine how the memoir interrogates the divisions between Catalans and Spanish migrants, this essay argues for reading Els castellans as a coming-of-age allegory of Catalan and Spanish political transitions that provides a much-needed reckoning with Catalonia’s history of immigration. At the same time, the memoir spatially connects the mid-century Spanish migrants to present-day Moroccan immigrants, revealing a recurring fear of mobility. Els castellans counters this fear by articulating a dynamic, bidirectional integration process that transforms the host as much as the migrant.

Post/Colonial Reconfigurations. The Disregarded, Renewed Arrival of Spaniards in Rio De Janeiro

Given the renewed arrival of Spanish migrants in Brazil since 2008, I analyze how post/colonial power relations are re/configured and contradictions produced when legal and economic precarity question status hierarchies based on origin, race, and class. Brazil currently hosts the largest number of illegalized Spaniards worldwide. Illegality and precarity contest the favorable effects of nearly unconditional whiteness in Brazil and globally racialized, colonial power hierarchies. Derived from 2.5 years of ethnographic fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro since 2014, my interlocutors’ trajectories show how they struggle with and embrace the urban fabric and its structural post/colonial configuration.

Nostalgic, Converted, or Cosmopolitan: Typology of Young Spanish Migrants

The high unemployment rate that is affecting Spain in recent years, along with the consolidation of labour market insecurity, have generated great changes in social behaviour, with a prominent tendency for young people to leave the country. With the aim of understanding, from the point of view of these new migrants, how their migration processes and sociocultural integration in their host countries are, this article follows the procedures of the Grounded Theory to analyse the discourses obtained through a discussion group and 41 in-depth interviews with young Spanish migrants while they were living abroad, during the period 2010–2015. The strength of this research lies in its construction of an empirical model consisting of three procedural categories: nostalgic adaptation, converted adaptation and cosmopolitan adaptation. These categories allow us to explain how the perception of young people about their home and host societies changes, as well as how their sociocultural adaptation to the new context is affected by the conducts and behaviours inherent to said perception.

“Here, There, in between, beyond…”: Identity Negotiation and Sense of Belonging among Southern Europeans in the UK and Germany

Whilst most of the research on intra-EU mobility has mainly focused on the reasons behind young Southern Europeans leaving their home countries, and secondly on their experiences within the new context, little is known about their sense of belonging and identities. This article aims to fill this gap by exploring Italian and Spanish migrants’ social identity repositioning and the cultural change characterising their existential trajectories. Drawing on 69 semi-structured interviews with Italians and Spaniards living in London and Berlin, this article shows that the sense of belonging to one or more political communities and boundary work are related to individual experiences and can change due to structural eventualities such as the Brexit referendum. While identification with the host society is rare, attachment to the home country is quite common as a result of people’s everyday experiences. Cultural changes and European/cosmopolitan identification are linked to exposure to new environments and interaction with new cultures, mostly concerning those with previous mobility experience, as well as to a sentiment of non-acceptance in the UK. However, such categories are not rigid, but many times self-identification and attachments are rather blurred also due to the uncertainty around the duration of the mobility project. This makes individual factors (gender, age, family status, employment, education) that are often considered as determinants of identification patterns all but relevant.