The silent inquisition: Islamophobic microaggressions and Spanish Moroccan identity negotiations in contemporary Madrid

Abstract

French

This article explores Spanish Moroccan experiences with Islamophobic microaggressions in contemporary Madrid. It seeks to fill an important gap in the literature on religion and racial microaggressions by moving beyond the usual psychologistic explanations to show how these acts reflect Spanish historical-racialized structures, where Muslims were regarded as the Other. In utilizing in-depth qualitative interviews and participant observations, the author reveals how Spanish Moroccans are negotiating and responding to Islamophobic microaggressions at work, educational institutions, and the public sphere. Ultimately, this research shows how these microaggressions reinforced a Muslim-first identity framework, which allowed them to strategically link their experiences and identities to a collective, historical memory of Muslim Spain.

Keywords

Islam Islamophobia racial microaggressions Spain

Introduction

The Spanish Moroccan community’s experiences with Spanish Islamophobic projects have shaped their diasporic consciousness and lived-realities. The exclusionary tone of Spanish cultural and political discourses of anything Moroccan Muslim has racialized the communal tensions between the majority White, Spanish Catholic community, and the Spanish Moroccan community. While the Spanish state has made great strides in the post-Franco era to pursue policies that challenge and rid the state from discriminatory practices and laws toward minority communities, the reality is many Spanish Moroccans experience racial mechanisms that subordinate their status in contemporary Spain (Bonilla-Silva, 1997). The source of these racist projects which have historically defined the Spanish state through the denial of Muslims in its territorial boundaries is found in the multiple narratives surrounding the so-called Reconquista, the Spanish Inquisition, and Spanish colonialism.

While these historical forces have shaped the structural conditions in which Spanish Moroccans and other minorities continue to toil, it is also reproduced in everyday social interactions via Islamophobic microaggressions. These microaggressions ‘are brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults to target a person or group’, reinforcing White supremacy (Sue et al., 2007: 273). For the Spanish Moroccan community, this was experienced at work (Embrick, 2011), educational institutions, and in the public sphere. Their experiences with Islamophobic microaggressions (Husain and Howard, 2017; Nadal et al., 2012) reveal how the discriminatory actions, statements, and stressors impact Spanish Moroccan identity, social mobility, and acceptance into the larger Spanish imagined community.

In building off Urciuoli’s (1996: 15) understanding of racialization as a process that is, ‘typified as human matter out of place: dirty, dangerous, unwilling, or unable to do their bit for the nation-state’, this article fills an important gap in the literature surrounding religious microaggressions (Husain and Howard, 2017; Nadal et al., 2012) and their impact on Spanish Moroccan identity negotiations. This article will reveal how my participants’ experiences with Islamophobic microaggressions at work, in educational institutions, and the public sphere reinforced Muslim-first identities (Naber, 2005) that not only linked them to a Spanish Moorish collective memory but also challenged and decentered prevailing discourses on contemporary Spanish identity. The article will first discuss contemporary Spanish Islamophobia to show how the socially constructed spatial boundaries in contemporary Spain are reinforcing and sustaining Islamophobic microaggressions. Then the article will reveal how the Spanish Moroccan community is negotiating Islamophobic microaggressions experienced at work, educational institutions, and in the public sphere. Ultimately, showing how this ‘everyday racism’ (Essed, 1990) produced a Muslim identity framework in which my participants reimagined and reconstructed their identities as Spanish Moroccans and their memories of place and home.

Spain, Islamophobia, and the Spanish Moroccan community

The visibility of Spanish Moroccans in Spanish society is shifting the racial fault lines in contemporary Spain. As the second-largest migrant community in Spain with nearly 800,000 residents, they make up nearly 20% of the Moroccan migrant population in Europe (Aneas et al., 2012). Since the fall of the last Moorish kingdom of Granada in 1492 and the ensuing imperial regimes thereafter, Spain has accentuated the orientalist legacy of Europe by regarding their Muslim minorities (historically and contemporarily) as an all-encompassing Other (Sayad, 1992) neither belonging to the nation’s imagined community, nor racially or culturally fit to be citizens (1992: 292–299). While the study of Spanish Islamophobia is fairly recent (Téllez-Delgado and Ramírez-Fernández, 2018: 310), several studies have captured the evolving literature. Aguilera-Carnerero and Azeez (2017: 600) found in their seminal report that Islamophobia is rooted in Spanish macro-institutional structures and everyday microsocial interactions. Other research addresses the Spanish ‘historical amnesia’ regarding (Medina-Bravo et al., 2018) the Muslim presence and its impact on Islamophobic media content consumption in Spain (Observatorio de la islamophobia en los medios, 2017). Alcántara-Plá and Ruiz-Sánchez (2017: 17) found that Islamophobic ideologies are so embedded in the Spanish media that when Muslims are mentioned on Spanish social networking sites, they are framed as military invaders and historical enemies. Other recent studies have examined the intersectional perspectives between Islamophobia and ethnicity (Bravo López, 2012), gender (Ramírez and Mijares, 2018), patriarchy (Guia, 2018), collective memory (Ouassini, 2019), immigration (Cea d’Ancona, 2016), policing and social control (Álvaro et al., 2015), recognition struggles (Dietz, 2004), and the impact of secular political identities on the presence of Islam in Spain (López Bargados, 2018).

In her study of contemporary Muslim minorities in Spain, Gema Martin-Munoz (2003: 49–51) found that while Spain may integrate some Muslim minorities into Spanish society, they still have difficulties finding jobs and creating ‘meaningful relationships’ with the majority White, Spanish Catholic population. Zapata-Barrero’s (2006: 14) study of Muslim–Christian relations in Spain demonstrates how negative historical perceptions of the ‘Muslim moor’ are consistently reinforced in media discourses on the question of immigration and the Moroccan community leading to what he calls Maurophobia or the fear of the Moor (Dietz, 2004). This reality is also supported in the contents of Spanish school textbooks in which the denial of the Muslim presence in Spanish history is paradoxically the norm (Flesler, 2008: 2). The Spanish historical and cultural perspectives toward the Moroccan presence have afforded them the label of the ‘unwanted’ minority with one of the lowest levels of acceptance as neighbors and citizens (Flesler, 2008: 2). Islamophobic ideologies and practices have become the discursive acts that shape and define Spanish national distinctiveness along ethnic and racial lines, which ultimately excludes the contaminated Muslim (Razack, 2008).

An additional layer of Islamophobia can be found in the racialized social boundaries and institutions that regulate Muslim identity (Duderija, 2007; Naber, 2005). Eid (2002: 45–46) states that racialization via legal and cultural stigmatization allows ‘second generations of Muslims to re-assign new meanings and roles to Islam as an ethnic identity marker to re-appropriate and transform ethnoreligious identity origination in the community’. Thus, leading to what Naber (2005) problematically noted as the normative Muslim-first, ethnic/national identity second phenomenon among Muslim youth in Europe and the United States. The internalization and profusion of Islamophobia in the lived experiences of Spanish Moroccans ‘results in Muslims being viewed as permanent foreigners’ (Garner and Selod, 2015: 16) and un-Spanish. In this context, the Islamophobic microaggressions (Husain and Howard, 2017; Nadal et al., 2010) experienced by my participants at work, school, and in the public sphere have shaped their life outcomes and incorporation into the larger non-Muslim Spanish community. As Schein (2002: 2) notes, ‘ideas such as race and racism do not emerge unprompted from individual minds, but are thoroughly embedded in our collective everyday lives and in the very structures of our social, political and economic activities’. The themes that shape these Islamophobic microaggressions include common perceptions of Muslims as terrorists, perceiving the Islamic faith as an invading force, active denial of Muslim history and presence in Spain, and a general Othering of the Muslim community. However, unlike previous research, which finds that perceived religious discrimination shapes mistrust and dislike of the state and society in their host nation, in Spain my participants’ negotiations with Islamophobic microaggressions have allowed them to emphasize their Islamic identity claims to Spain rather than exclude their narratives from the larger White, Spanish Catholic imagined community. It is these macro–micro conditions that allow for the construction of what Portes and Rumbaut (2001) call ‘reactive ethnicity’, a propensity in which Muslim minorities construct defensive identities to self-identify with the affiliation for which they are most attacked by the mainstream majority in order to ‘feel solidarity; gather together, mobilize, encourage each other and take sides’ (Maalouf, 1998: 34).

A note on methodology

For this study, in-depth qualitative interviews, participant observations, and secondary data were used to understand how Spanish Moroccans are negotiating and responding to Islamophobic microaggressions in contemporary Spain. A total of 33 interviews were conducted in Darija Arabic between March 2011 and May 2011. All my interviewees were 18 years or older, Muslim, Spanish citizens of Moroccan descent, including first-, 1.5-, and second generation. I included only Spanish Moroccan citizens from Madrid, Spain, in my sample criteria to control for perceptions of difference from a legal and political standpoint between the Spanish Moroccan community and the White, Spanish Catholic majority. According to the Pew Research Center (2020), 99.9% of the Moroccan population is Muslim, and 75.2% of the Spanish population is Christian. While all of my participants self-identified as Muslim, it is important to note that auto-identification with Islam in this study does not correspond with religious belief and practice. Moreover, the utilization of the analytical category of Spanish Catholic does not denote religious belief and practice in Catholicism as it is a useful concept my participants employed, and I adopted to describe the non-Muslim, White, Spanish majority. I interviewed 12 females and 21 males, and an equal number of participants across the generational divide. The gender and generational divide in my sample reflects Spanish Moroccan immigration patterns in which the majority are first- and second-generation males. Moreover, it would be nearly impossible to find a third- or fourth-generation Spanish Moroccan from Madrid who was not originally from one of the Spanish enclaves in Ceuta and Melilla in North Africa. Finally, I heavily sampled from three mosques in Madrid, Spanish Moroccan populated neighborhoods of Lavapies and Tetouan, and ‘Spanish Moroccan shops’ in the pueblos of Fuenlabrada and Pinto on the outskirts of Madrid.

Islamophobic microaggressions at work

My participants’ concentration in low-paying, blue-collar positions reflects the racialized structures of the Spanish labor market. These historically embedded hierarchies are actively shaping Spanish Moroccan diasporic consciousness and perceived statuses as citizens in Madrid. This exploitation was not lost on my participants, as there was a keen recognition of their lower socioeconomic positions vis-à-vis the White, Spanish Catholic majority. This was further heightened in 2011 as Spain was going through an economic crisis in which the overall unemployment rate reached 23% (Thompson, 2011). Moreover, the Spanish Moroccan community’s concentration in the construction sector would make them one of the hardest hit immigrant communities (Élteto, 2011). The experiences of my participants at work were, thus, impacted by the consequences of this economic crisis, including the rise of anti-immigrant sentiments throughout Spain, minimal upward economic and social mobility, and incessant Islamophobia (Cea d’Ancona, 2016). Aisha, a first-generation, Spanish Moroccan with four children, exemplified these feelings of marginalization that her children will not be afforded the same opportunities toward upward social mobility. She emphatically pronounced,

our kids have to study and learn anything they can to be successful and even then, they will not be like the Spanish, Romanians, and even Pakistanis and Syrians. Their kids will be doctors and businessmen, while our kids will break their backs.

This statement reflects the impact of the segmented workforce, which creates barriers to access the cultural and social capital that the White majority populations and other ‘favored’ minorities have access too.

The structural arrangements found in the workforce are based on Spanish immigration policy (Gest, 2010) that historically relegated Moroccans to the agricultural and service sector, in which the majority of Moroccans still occupy. These ‘positions’ were referenced by my participants as sites where Islamophobic microaggressions were primarily experienced. They not only normalized the negative Spanish societal and cultural attitudes toward the Moroccan Muslim community but also justified the structural inequalities in place (Flesler, 2008). This lived-reality was best explained by a Spanish Moroccan migrant who worked on a farm in Murcia before saving enough money to move his family to Madrid. He states,

I worked at the Alexandria farm in the Murcia region for nearly eleven years … yes, eleven years. I was treated like a slave. I worked twelve, sometimes fifteen hours a day. I tried to find a good job in Valencia or Granada … because I have my cousin living in Granada who is married, I couldn’t go. I wanted to leave when I got my five-year papers but my boss would threaten to cancel my contract and not pay my immigration fee for that year if I leave. He would curse at me and threaten to kick me out of the country like they did with the Muslims before. He would often get drunk with some of the Latino workers and would dare me to drink and go against my religion. He would taunt me and say if I drank with him, he would give me a day off. But this was mostly when he was drunk’.

The perception that Spanish Moroccans are expendable and can be removed or ‘kicked out’ of the country is reproduced and experienced a lot by my participants in the workplace. This included deliberately denying religious accommodation, reinforcing ethnic competition between the Moroccans and other minority communities, and the experience of unemployment.

Denying religious accommodations

Nearly all my participants experienced a lack of religious accommodation in the workplace. Many were warned by their employers that prayers and rituals should be ‘practiced’ at home. Abdullah stated,

I can’t pray at work, I mean the boss is always complaining that the 10 minutes I take to pray the dhuhr prayer is too much and makes me lazy. Even the people I work with are racist and think if someone prays, they are religious … which means they are associated with Al Qaeda. So, I do not want to deal with that stuff and I just wait until I get home and pray all the prayers together.

Consequently, these experiences superimposed a confrontational environment in the workplace as my participants expressed that co-workers and employers were actively and perniciously denying them their religious and cultural rights. Hamza infers,

my work scheduler purposely schedules me to work on Friday, I ask him every month to give me Friday off and he doesn’t; even though he knows I have to go to Friday prayer. I work at a restaurant that is not busy on Friday during dhuhr time. All we are doing is preparing food for dinner. All I asked for was a day off or a one-hour break and I get nothing.

Other participants cited fears of retaliation and/or possible sanction from their employers as the primary reason they did not request time off. This was further exacerbated for those who did not hold official positions and worked ‘under the table’ as they did not have the means or capability to redress the issue.

Mohamed exemplified this dynamic in the following statement. He states,

May Allah forgive me, but I don’t even try (to practice his faith at work). What’s the point? They will find a reason to fire me if I am too bothersome. I just put my head down, work, and save money. That’s all I can do.

The lack of religious accommodation at the workplace was coupled by taunts and anti-Muslim, anti-Moroccan aggressive behavior that often challenged the place of Islam and Muslims in Madrid and Spanish history. Abdul Jabbar remembers,

for the first three years when I came to Spain as a young man, I worked in Costa del Sol, my boss called me Moro or saying, hey … like he would a dog. He never called me by my name. I was 24 years old. Whenever something happens, he would come to me and tell me, see what you people do, and/or threaten to nullify my contract and send me back to Morocco. This increased when the terrorist attacks occurred. That was a bad time if we couldn’t respond in normal times (too aggressive taunts and verbal attacks) imagine what it was like after the attacks.

The racist discourses shaped the demeanor of White Spaniards who would often label Spanish Moroccans as slow, unreliable, and cunning. Sufyan, a second-generation Spanish Moroccan, said in a laughing tone:

at my job, I am always observed they never let me work the register because Moroccans in the past stole from the store … I think it was one Moroccan who worked a couple of months before me. But this year two Spaniards and one Romanian stole not only money but also radios, TVs, and phones and they do not treat the other workers like they do with me.

Other participants explained that unfounded indifference and discrimination were the general norms and that racism, stereotyping, and prejudice were a part of their everyday work experiences.

Ethnic competition and Islamophobia

My participants complained that White, Spanish Catholic business owners would refuse to employ Spanish Moroccans because South American migrants worked for a lower hourly rate, while threatening Spanish Moroccan employees who ‘complain’ with layoffs and firings. Latifa said,

I have worked in De Maria restaurant for seven years, I have never missed a day, never get in trouble, and always do my best at the job, even customers ask for me. I never got a raise or recognition. Ecuadorians come and start from the bottom and in months they are working over me. When I ask my boss for a raise or a promotion, he says, No! And I have to remain frustrated at myself and be quiet.

The competition in the workplace has produced antagonistic discourses, especially as they relate to the social positioning and status of South Americans in contemporary Spain. A quite revealing historical arrogance emerged in the interviews with a couple of my participants when discussing the marginalized position of South Americans in contemporary Spain. The attitudes are a by-product of the systemic racism structured in the workplace dynamics between and among the immigrant communities and the larger White, Spanish Catholic population. My participants cited the historical continuum between what they saw as the ‘slave-like nature’ of the South American vis-à-vis the Spaniard, citing history and contemporary politics. Mehdi states,

I feel sorry for the Latinos, they have no strength to face these Spaniards … they work like slaves for the Spanish and get paid nothing … I would never work like that. They do it because they are used to it and the Spanish have been doing it to them for six hundred years. The Spanish could never control Moroccans, and Moroccans have too much pride.

Mehdi is referencing the pride surrounding the Moroccan resistance during the Rif War in which the Riffian rebel commander, Abdel Karim Al Khattabi led his forces to victory in the Battle of Annual, resulting in the deaths of thousands of Spanish colonial soldiers (Jensen, 2019).

Beyond the feelings of empathy, many of my participants complained about the White, Spanish Catholic majority recruiting Latinos and Filipinos for traditional labor positions that Moroccans occupy, pointing to their faith as the primary motivator. Abdul Qadr states, ‘they want their own Christians to work for them instead of the Muslims because they don’t want us to grow and establish Islam in Spain … they just don’t want us’. This assertion by Abdul Qadr reflects the multiple sites that Spanish Whiteness employs its advantages and privilege across the increasingly segmented workforce in contemporary Madrid. The transparent dominance of Whiteness is contextualized in individual interactions and operating procedures of day-to-day actions that shape possibilities for work promotion, workplace tolerance, and opportunities for wage increases. Moreover, the micro-level Islamophobic aggression experienced by many of my participants shaped their perceptions of Spanish society producing the feelings of exclusionary commonalities with other minorities in Spanish society and state. This was best captured in Sulayman’s statement regarding work–life interactions with the White majority. He said,

the Spanish (white-Catholic majority) don’t accept us and that is fine. But we must show them that we are not villagers who don’t know a phone from a TV. We have to be better than the Romanians and Ecuadorians in our day-to-day interactions with them; we are Muslims … of course, that is what we are supposed to do. They treat us bad, yes, but unfortunately, we do the same thing and do just like them to everybody (Spanish, Romanians, and Latinos). Once they see we are better in our actions then they will respect us and treat us as equals. Until then we have to suffer here.

Unemployment

The experience of unemployment was also contextualized as a by-product of Spanish Islamophobia. My first- and 1.5-generation participants generally cited work as the most important reason for migration to Spain, referencing the need to financially provide for their families in Madrid and Morocco. Also, for my male participants, the cultural and religious dictates surrounding the norms of the ‘breadwinner’ have bounded and solidified the male gender role as the primary income winner in the Moroccan household. Hence, the question of unemployment as it was tied to Spanish Islamophobia challenged the predominant cultural and religious norms surrounding the Spanish Moroccan male identity. As Mustafa, an unemployed mechanic, stated,

I don’t have a job right now, I have to depend on the government to give me money. I can’t go back to Morocco because there is nothing there … So, what do I do? I have to live like I am dead here. We are living worse than in Morocco.

When I asked whether his wife was working, he ashamedly turned away from me and said ‘yes’ as if to acknowledge a loss of pride and its accompanying ‘manhood’.

Incidentally, most of the men and women in my study noted how easy it was for Spanish Moroccan women to obtain jobs as opposed to the men. Khadija states,

I got my current job in the first application as a cook in an Ethiopian restaurant while my husband has applied for every job available in Spain [laughing] and could not get anything. They give us jobs maybe because we are hard workers.

For my male participants, this ‘accommodation’ was often explained in the context of Islamophobia and Spanish orientalist ambitions to ‘save’ the Muslim female from ‘Moroccan Muslim male treachery’. Seven of my married participants cited a perceived sense of state/cultural intrusion into their marital affairs via the employment/unemployment status of Spanish Moroccan women vis-à-vis their husbands. When I pressed this issue with Abdul Jabbar, he explicitly stated, ‘the Spanish only put our women to work to humiliate us. They think that this will make them Christians or leave Islam. They want to challenge us in our house. They are not going to win’.

My female participants also cited Spanish racism as a reason for their employment status. Latifa states,

I know why they don’t give our husbands jobs and you find all the Moroccan women working. My husband has tried for two years and all he can get is menial jobs with his friends or sell things in Morocco. But we (women) can get jobs easily. My friend told me that factories were (neighborhood in Fuenlabrada) asking if any women wanted to go to school and/or needed jobs. They will never do this for the men. They think we need to be free and liberated so the government helps us more than them. It’s unfortunate because I don’t want to work and I believe that my husband should support the family but I guess for now at least we can pay the bills.

The gendered work dynamic present in Spanish Moroccan households is challenging and reshaping gender relations in the community. Many of my female participants sought to reinforce an Islamic identity to convince the family and community that honor is maintained while also providing and garnering greater support from their husbands and family members. Latifa states,

I started wearing hijab when I came to Spain … About a year after I came to Spain. My husband and I thought it was the best thing to do, especially because I work with a lot of men at the restaurant. I find that a lot of the Spanish people treat me with more respect and even call me a saint [laughing]. Plus, it makes Allah and my husband happy with me, which is more important.

The resistance at work to microaggressive Islamophobic expressions and behavior has taken on various forms, including passive submission, active resistance, and manipulation. The majority of my participants were passively submissive to overt and covert Islamophobic actions. This does not mean they accepted their exploitation. My participants spoke with pride of not accepting the working conditions they found themselves in, and in unemployment, they found a semblance of respect. Ahmed stated,

Moroccans are not like others. Look at our history we never sat back and let the Spanish do as they will with us. We always fought back. I will not sell myself to the Spaniard and I am sorry to say this, but I would rather sell marijuana then go clean Spanish toilets.

Others cited the growth of Islam in Spain as the source of tension experienced at the workplace as Tariq articulated:

the government is purposely not giving anybody jobs, so we would leave the country voluntarily; and if we don’t, then as you see the economy is dying and they are blaming the immigrants for all the problems. They will have another inquisition to kick us out. But the people will do it (Spanish people).

Experiences with Islamophobic microaggressions at educational institutions

The passing of the 1992 Agreement of Cooperation with the Islamic Commission of Spain (CEI), a representative body of Islamic organizations, made it possible for Muslim students to receive an Islamic education in public schools. This was groundbreaking as it formally recognized Islam in Spain but also challenged the Catholic Church’s monopoly over religious education (Berglund, 2015). Moreover, it afforded minority religious traditions and organizations the same rights as the Catholic Church (Berglund, 2015: 27). However, these institutional reforms did not have an impact on my participants’ perceptions of their experiences with educational institutions and in fact, not one of my participants mentioned receiving or having access to religious education. Berglund (2015: 28) argues this may be the result of a number of issues including the program is underfunded and not ‘offered in many schools’ even with a large Muslim student contingent. Garreta-Bochaca et al. (2018) attribute this problem to the lack of qualified Islamic religious educators, which allows the positions to remain unfulfilled. Another study conducted by the Redco Project found Muslim parents are generally unaware of their rights to request Islamic religious educational alternatives for their kids, which forces many students in educational modules that emphasize the dominant White, Spanish Catholic historical and religious paradigms (Berglund, 2015: 28). Thus, I situate my participants’ narratives with their relationships with Spanish educational institutions at two levels, as students and parents of students. Thirteen of my participants attended Spanish public schools, while another 10 have interactions with educational institutions in the capacity as current parents or guardians of students. The experiences of my participants reveal that Islamophobic microaggressions were present at the bureaucratic and at the micro-interactional level of analysis. An important component in understanding the scope of their experiences reflects Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic violence, wherein classroom curricula and instruction represented a selective tradition that entrenches Spanish White cultural paradigms over all other forms.

The way this symbolic violence was actualized in educational institutional settings was through religious stereotypes, assumptions of religious homogeneity, feelings of cultural superiority, and through the language of Othering (Nadal et al., 2012). The minority experience in the classroom setting was best described in Maha’s description of her school. She states,

it was in school, I learned I was different. I didn’t wear hijab and most people couldn’t tell where I was from but as soon as the teacher would say my name or they would see my mom with hijab when she picked me up, they knew I was a Muslim. When I went to high school there were not many Moroccans in my school, I think there four students in my whole class. But I learned about my identity in school.

Amin further explains, ‘it didn’t matter if I looked like them (Spaniards), even though most Spaniards look like us, my name identified me as Muslim and so we were different, like from another planet’. Schools as racializing agents categorize the identities of my participants as bearing different expectations from the Spanish students. Thus, the racializing messages resulted in overt discrimination and biases. Amin’s statement captures the negative interactions with teachers that often reinforce low expectations and instill doubt. He states,

I will never forget this … we had a day where my teacher asked us about our career ambitions and stuff like that. She walked around the room and told all the Spanish kids, ‘you will be a doctor and engineer’, and whenever she would come to the Moroccans, she would say all the low paying jobs like; waiters and construction workers. There were many Moroccans in the class. When she came to me, she said you can be a restaurant manager. I didn’t think about that until years later.

The racial microaggressions resulted in teasing and name-calling, which would often result in fights and conflicts between the Spanish Moroccans and other Spanish/ethnic minority students. Amin states, ‘we had our Moroccan gang and anybody who messed with us, especially if they messed with Moroccan girls, then they would get a beat down … I mean this was the only way to defend ourselves from their insults’. The manufactured differences reinforced at school resulted in mental and physical segregation as violence and in-group–out-group hostilities emerged.

The Spanish Moroccan students would only ‘hang’ around each other and were broadly considered the ‘hashish sellers’ or ‘terrorists’ taking on mediatized images of the Moroccan drug dealer and Muslim terrorist.

Anas recounts how White Spanish students would label, tease, and bully Spanish Moroccan students with no administrative sanctions given to the students who perpetrated the bullying and teasing. He states, ‘Terrorists, terrorists … were the names that kids would call us, they were playing, but I would get mad and would want to fight’. When I followed up with a question about what course of action the teachers and administrative staff took in addressing the matter, he emphatically said, ‘nothing’. Other interviewees often internalized these images to evoke respect and power in a context that offered very little of each. Fareed states, ‘school made me proud to be Moroccan because everybody feared us, they saw us as drug dealers, terrorists, gangsters … the Spanish girls liked us too. Nobody messed with us because they thought we were crazy’. Another form of protest cited by participants was the emphasis in their support of Barcelona FC soccer club. Every participant who attended school in Madrid was an avid Barcelona FC fan and when I would infer why, they would respond that it was a form of protest against their treatment and lives in Madrid or as Amin stated in definite terms, ‘to go against Madrid, meant that we were different’. Several of the participants interviewed indicated that the negative stereotyping and ethno-racial climate conjured feelings of difference and self-loathing. For instance, Sumaya states in response to the negative hostility experienced at school:

I didn’t learn anything in school except that you need money to get a good education; you need to be Spanish to get a good education, and that at the end of the day even if I did get good grades, I was not going anywhere as I was seen as second class. I have applied for many jobs and didn’t get anything. What is the education good for?

The ethno-racial messages were also conveyed in the curriculum and classroom instruction. I asked my participants how Spanish Moroccan history and relations were presented in the classroom and all my participants felt that it was never portrayed accurately. Anas states, ‘Moroccan and Muslim history was never presented in the classroom, it is as though we were never here, like the civil war never happened, or colonization, or the Islamic history. It’s funny really’. The curricula valued mainstream Spanish narratives while discounting Moorish history by downplaying and subverting their narrative and contemporary presence.

Thus, historical memory was contained and constrained by constructing a singular narrative of Spanish history that was composed of absolutist identities. For my participants, the teachers’ lack of acknowledgment of the historical presence of Muslims inferred that Spanish Moroccans did not belong to Spanish national identity. Moreover, when the Muslim world or Morocco was discussed in the classroom setting, it was always in a negative context. Anisa articulated,

I remember we were once talking about human rights in Western Sahara and the way the teacher talked about us would make it seem like we were animals in thirst of blood and that we were killing the Western Saharans with no impunity. She said things like Moroccans don’t know diplomacy, they only know tough action among … other things. But she doesn’t talk about how they treated us in the Spanish civil war or how Franco killed thousands of Moroccans for ‘freedom’.

Anisa is referencing the deployment of nearly 80,000 Moroccan troops who fought in the Spanish Civil War with the Nationalists against the Republicans, in which nearly 55,468 Moroccans were injured, and 11,500 died (Wright, 2020: 53).

In the face of these pervasive feelings of classroom discrimination, my participants were not passive as they actively resisted negative classroom instruction about Spanish Muslim history. In fact, it was a point of pride, as Faouzia states,

my father always reminded us of our history in Spain and how the Arabs built a strong society that had science and culture. I once told my teacher; Mrs. Reyes I think her name was. Anyways, she was talking about Spanish history and how Spain was once a great empire and I told her, do you forget who helped built the Spanish empire? The Muslims. She looked at me with a stunned face … I will never forget that. She didn’t say no, but she didn’t say yes, either.

This attempt by my participants to include their narrative in the national imagined community allows them to assert their identity as Spanish Moroccans and as Muslims. As Malkki (1995: 6) explained, ‘the construction of a national past is a construction of history of a particular kind; it is one that claims moral attachments to specific territories, motherlands or homelands, and posits time-honored links between people, policy, and territory’.

The experiences for my female participants who wore the headscarf were incessantly difficult and often placed them in a position where they were seen as ‘representatives’ of the Muslim community and the Muslim world. Moreover, the mediatized ideologies attached to the headscarf also meant that they became central subjects in their school’s relationships with the Muslim community. This point of contention allowed the Spanish Moroccan girls to be at the forefront of the daily discrimination and aggression experienced at all levels in both the educational settings and in society. This is illustrated in Sumaya’s statement about her relationship with the hijab:

I could never hide in the hijab like my brothers. I was always a Muslim first no matter what I may claim to be and it’s what I am, a Muslim. But my friends and teachers would have assumptions about me even before knowing about me. I was treated as though I was oppressed but they don’t know that my parents treat me like a queen. That hurt me because they would look at my father like he abused me when in reality I was a queen. I felt my teachers think I was always forced to put on my headscarf and that my parents did that to me.

Moreover, both parents and former students complained that there is an active campaign to ‘out’ conservative parents who do not allow children to attend dances, mixed swimming lessons, and who have daughters who wear the hijab. Layla stated,

They (school officials and teachers) meet with my daughters and ask them if I don’t let them go to school events … they want our kids to participate in the filth. My kids don’t want to go to that stuff anyway, but they make sure to ask them because they don’t believe that they wouldn’t do it without my pressure on them.

When I asked Amin and Faouzia about this, they both confirmed that school counselors would request private meetings and ask if their parents are resisting school activities, they deem to be un-Islamic and/or not culturally befitting like dances or field trips. Faouzia further stated,

the school acts like being Arab (Moroccan) and Muslim is a disease that can affect everybody. But I don’t care about them we are Muslim, Arab, and Spanish, all in one. If they don’t like it, then they don’t like it. It does not bother me.

Experiences with Islamophobic microaggressions in public life

The emergence of the Spanish Moroccan satellite public spheres (Squires, 2002: 448) in the city of Madrid is an important component of the ways Islamophobic microaggressions are increasingly shaping their public lives. The public targeting of Spanish Moroccan institutions structures the ways we think about the processes of racialization in the cities landscape. The harassment by policing and security institutions and the consistent badgering and name-calling by fellow citizens have facilitated the construction of communities that are built and imagined in the periphery. The Spanish Moroccan communities racializing experiences have largely been shaped by the neighborhoods and the social positions they occupy in the present landscape. The community is geographically scattered throughout the city of Madrid primarily residing in the outskirts of the city. The economic and social exclusion of Spanish Moroccans is beginning to manifest in the structural divisions in the physical landscape of contemporary Madrid. In central Madrid, minutes from the tourist haven of Plaza del Sol, Lavapies sits as the multicultural hub of Madrid. It was historically an immigrant majority neighborhood that politicians have touted as the most diverse in Madrid. Nonetheless, the realities on the ground tell a different story as Lavapies has increasingly become a model of neoliberal gentrification, which, over the past decade, has seen the local immigrant population displaced. This was done through policies that encouraged middle and upper-middle classes to acquire property in Lavapies, while creating the infrastructure to ensure that public space and culture was controlled, surveilled, and policed for the new gentrifiers (Sequera and Janoschka, 2015: 385).

It is here where I met Amin, a second-generation Spanish Moroccan, who works and lives in Lavapies. Amin, a waiter and student, who goes to school in the daytime and works as a waiter at night described his experiences as a youth in the neighborhood of Lavapies:

This was the place that all the foreigners would come to live Ecuadorians, Pakistanis, Algerians; but it was always dominated by Moroccans until 10 years ago when the bombing occurred and the police started giving us a hard time here … many times the Spanish and even Moroccan owners of apartments would refuse to rent to Moroccans because we were seen as a liability.

In my time with Amin, I felt his sense of urgency to leave Lavapies and move to the outskirts of Madrid to enter the spatial boundaries of the Spanish Moroccan community occupies. In many ways, this shifting of place provides sanctuary from an increasingly racially divided city of Madrid. As Amin and I walked throughout the tight-knit neighborhoods of Lavapies, he pointed with a sense of nostalgia and sadness at former apartment blocks that were solely occupied by Moroccans. He explained how in the course of 10 to 15 years the Moroccan community became internal exiles in their city, as the Spanish Moroccan population began moving outside of the city center in response to increased police harassment, lack of employment opportunities, and communal ties.

This lived-reality is actualized in the day-to-day run-ins with the police and everyday life course activities, which were experienced firsthand. Nearly every time I ventured out in public with two or more of my Spanish Moroccan peers, we were approached by police stopped, frisked, and questioned about our identities and paperwork. During one of my interviews at an open-air cafe in the center of Madrid, two police officers approached us as my participant and I was in an informal conversation and rudely asked us for our paperwork in front of a large crowd of café-goers. When we initially refused, they told us to stand up, walk outside of the perimeters of the café, frisked us in front of everybody, looked at our documentation, and after waiting 20 minutes to check with authorities, they finally apologized when it was confirmed that I was an American citizen and my passport was not ‘fake’. These events shaped my perceptions and experiences of life in the public sphere and made me curious to understand how my participants were impacted by such hostile interactions.

I would come to find these experiences represented the ways racism was a fundamental part of contemporary Spanish culture and is spread throughout the everyday social fabric of my participants’ lives. It would have a defining impact on how they crafted and negotiated identity, while challenging dominant narratives. Tariq states,

our public encounter with the police happens all the time … we can be standing waiting for the metro or going to work and the police would purposely hassle you, especially in the city center. They do this to make sure we feel like we are not welcome.

My participants often cited their problems with the police and their intrusive profiling, which often accuses the Spanish Moroccan community of theft and drug sales without evidentiary proof. Marwan infers,

the police you know can’t even tell the difference between us, that is why they wait until we are in groups and speak Moroccan Arabic. A cop once told me that they know how to identify Moroccans by the language and names. That is why they never stop us by ourselves but when we are in groups; because it is easier for them to identify us. They do this because they think we have no value for nothing. But they don’t see the Romanian mafias who are killing people, while a Moroccan may steal 10 Euros.

While police often harass Moroccan men, hijabi women are hassled by fellow citizens because the hijab is viewed either as a symbol of Islamic political ideology or as a tool that Muslim men utilize to dominate and control women’s bodies. As Anisa states,

most of the time, I am stopped at the shopping mall or school and people are nice, but always ask, why I wear hijab and if my husband told me to put it on … And then I have to tell them it’s my choice. When they see me with it, they think I have no brain.

The symbol of the hijab evoked sympathy for many of my female participants from Spanish citizens; however, even when the Spanish Moroccan women did not wear the hijab, they received similar responses from non-Muslims. For Amal, the Spaniards she interacted within the public sphere often think she is rebelling against her familial norms for not donning the hijab. She emphasized that such perceptions reinforce the notion that,

all of us (Muslim women) are supposed to be hijabis. They think that not wearing a hijab is going against my religion and culture. That is not true, in Morocco and around the world; the hijab is dependent on the women, not family. How many women wear the hijab in Morocco, I mean it’s ridiculous.

The racialized stereotypes enforced upon Amal are microaggressions that create and justify social inequities and feelings of difference in the public sphere.

Conclusion

My participants were able to transcend the Islamophobic microaggressions at work, educational institutions, and in the public sphere to construct an identity that is anchored within the Spanish nation-state. The racialized structures that gave way to these microaggressions not only deny critical opportunities for upward social mobility but also embed their identities in the Muslim-first identity framework (Naber, 2005; Portes and Zhou, 1993). This promoted group cohesion and community while supporting active resistance to the microaggressions. Moreover, it provided the necessary coping tools to help shape their precarious marginalized identities in an increasingly diverse and multicultural Spain. The construction of inclusive narratives and the expansion of cultural and religious borderlands was a theologizing experience for my participants (Smith, 1978: 1175). This enabled them to reconcile and internalize their Muslim identities to construct rich and complex identities as Spanish Moroccans, while challenging Spanish collective memory.

Footnotes

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Anwar Ouassini

Author biography

Anwar OUASSINI received his PhD in Sociology from the University of New Mexico (2013). He is currently an Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice at Delaware State University. His research and teaching interests include the sociology of race and ethnicity, sociology of religion, and Arab criminology.

Address: Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice, Delaware State University, 1200 N. DuPont Highway, Dover, DE 19901, USA.

Email: aouassini@desu.edu

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