We are living times of fear and anxiety about terrorists who, in the name of Islam, want to destroy icons of modernity and secular development. Arguments for a future of civilizational opposition maintained by several intellectuals around the world will surely conjure up the terrible images of the destruction that occurred on the 11th of September, 2001, in New York. Rhetorics of revenge grow at a global level, reconfigured as a new scenario of competing sacred and universal destinies. The complex dynamics of interethnic relations around the world, the new spaces of rich hybridization, and the historical experiences of peaceful...

The overall theme of this chapter is the analysis of the transformations of Andalusian peasants’ identity and class position over the last fifty years in the Valley of Alfaya. First I review the abject situation ofjornaleros,or day laborers, in post–Civil War Spain (from the 1940s thorough the 1950s); their experience of stigmatization during their forced emigration, and the changes emigration brought upon autochthonous notions of rights (from the 1960s through the early 1970s); and their newly won economic autonomy through innovative family-based intensive agriculture (in the 1970s). By the early 1980s, class positions had equalized. Civil, political,...

One summer day in 1994 I was chatting with some African friends in a central spot in Alfaya, close to the bus stop and the bar Ramiro, where most hiring goes on. A couple of years before, we would have gone to the bar for coffee and to pass time while waiting for some employer in need of a couple of hands to help him with his work. But the bar, owned and managed by a former emigrant to Germany, was a place where only local men now felt at home: after a couple of incidents with Arab immigrants he...

The day I arrived in the Valley of Alfaya, Andalusia, in July of 1992, I was invited to a gathering organized by a local nongovernmental organization (NGO) working for immigrants called “Everybody’s Land” in Arabic and Spanish (Ardo el-Jamia/Tierra de Todos). African immigrants waited outside for the party to begin. They sat on the stairs of the town hall, a white building that dominates one of the main plazas of the village, in which one also finds a kiosk where drinks are sold, a market, and a fountain called the Pilón. I was struck by the casual and carefree attitude...

The most important single requirement for a foreigner to live and work in Spain is possession of what are commonly referred to as “papers.”¹ To be able to acquire papers is a dream and a nightmare for most immigrants living in Granada. It is a nightmare because most immigrants do not have them and have no idea how long they will be able to avoid being detained by the ubiquitous police and the Civil Guard, which leads to deportation. It is a dream because, as I will explain in this chapter, papers are presented as the only way for foreigners...

African immigrants had been settling in Andalusia and elsewhere in Spain in significant numbers since the late 1980s, but the Spanish state and society were reluctant to accept the fact that immigration was an essential part of the rebordering of the Mediterranean and that immigrants were here to stay. Up to 1993, management of immigration centered exclusively on closing up the southern border of Europe, amidst a demagoguery of invasion and chaos. By 1994, however, civil society and state institutions came to accept immigration as an unavoidable phenomenon, concomitant with the modernization of the country.

Indeed, in 1994, the Ministry...

Ihave argued that the normalizing policies implemented in Spain as a result of the presence of Third World immigrants are part of a broader cultural and moral project whereby a modern citizenry (and alienness) is created. The legitimization of the rule of law, as the major ideological transformation underpinning the shaping of Spanish civil society, constructs a public space where legal subjects are guaranteed by the state the fundamental rights of the person through a bureaucracy that claims to be founded in an impersonal, impartial, and universalistic rationale. Although I have characterized this normalization process as a contested one,...

The integration of immigrants in the Spanish public sphere is blended into the larger strategy of the Spanish state to accommodate cultural difference while preserving an integrative framework of a common political community. This expansion of the model of citizenship to foreign non-national residents and the emphasis on a nonhomogeneous cultural belonging is linked to other key transformations of the model of national citizenship within the Spanish state. In Spain cultural diversity is constitutionally sanctioned, in contrast to other countries such as France, with its restrictive emphasis on equality and republican nationalism. Cultural difference is treated in its own political...

One of the main puzzles facing the analyst of the contemporary world is to explain why it might be, as Harvey puts it, “that the elaboration of place-bound identities has become more rather than less important in a world of diminishing spatial barriers to exchange, movement, and communication” (Harvey 1993, 4). The unification of Europe, which has almost completed its project of becoming a unique market with internal free circulation of goods, services, capital, and people, stands as an important example of the paradox to which Harvey is pointing. Contrary to the expectations of both modernist and Marxist theorists, new...