Jamón and Halal

Front matter

HATDA L

Lessons in Tolerance from Rural Andaluca

JAMÓN HALAL

Table of Contents

List of Figures xi Preface: My Family Narrative xiii 1 Introduction 1

The Setting 1

The Back Story: al-Andalus, Convivencia, and Andalusian Nationalism 6

Introduction

THE SETTING

The weekly Thursday market in Órgiva is a kaleidoscope of regional, national, religious, and ethnic origins, as well as of lifestyle choices.’ At one stand, in this town about 60 km southeast of the city of Granada, an older woman speaking Spanish with the local Alpujarran accent and wearing a black skirt, short-sleeve floral print blouse, and gold crucifix buys vegetables from a local farmer. Nearby, a group of teens browses an array of knock-off sneakers sold by a West African immigrant who travels for hours to sell his wares at different Andalusian markets. Elsewhere, a man with an Italian accent wearing a cotton tunic and an embroidered kufi cap (the brimless, cylindrical hat also known as a topi or taqiya) sells incense and hand-crafted soaps.? In front of a stand displaying dozens of bins full of aromatic spices, a Moroccan family confers in Arabic about what to purchase, and one of them places their order in Spanish. At a series of small tables, people sporting eclectic, mostly bohemian, clothes, piercings, and sometimes dreadlocks, many of whom arrived on foot from neighboring hippie communes, sell handmaid jewelry and pipes for smoking marijuana, with signs advertising their wares in a mix of Spanish and English, and bilingual brochures for a local exchange trading system, an alternative economic system based on barter.

Órgiva, a town of approximately 6,000 inhabitants nestled between the southern slopes of the Sierra Nevada and the smaller Sierra de Lújar mountains in the Alpujarra region of the province of Granada, boasts residents of nearly 70 nationalities and practitioners of various spiritual and healing traditions.? With so much diversity tucked between terraced almond, olive, and orange groves, Órgiva has been called “the little Manhattan of Andalucía” (Sánchez Alonso 2015a).* How does a small town in rural Spain come to be known as a literal global village distinguished by its harmonious cohabitation (convivencia)? How do narratives about this town represent its multicultural, multi-ethnic, and multi-confessional fabric, and what gets erased from such representations? How do its residents conceive of the town’s diversity and enact tolerance? What can the narratives about the town—both outside representations of it and residents” stories about their lived experience—tell us about the workings of tolerance? Through an analysis of written, visual, and oral narratives about the Alpujarra and specifically the town of Órgiva, this interdisciplinary inquiry responds to these questions and considers their broader implications in an increasingly globalized, yet conflict-ridden world.

With the intensification of intercultural contact that we know as globalization, which produces increased commonalities and increased inequalities, comes an intensification of the need or desire to assert specific identities. The Mediterranean region in particular is one of the hotbeds of such issues. As Natalia Ribas-Mateos, a specialist in North-South Mediterranean migration explains, the Mediterranean is “one of the most active friction-planes when considering North- South imbalances in the globalized world” (2001, 22). For this reason, various scholars have turned their attention to literary and cultural aspects of migration from North Africa to Spain.” Spain, and in particular the region of Andalucía, is home to many European converts to Islam, which adds another layer of complexity to this interfaith and intercultural confluence.* In articles and book-length studies, various anthropologists have examined the workings of tolerance, or the lack thereof, in the context of migrants, converts, and/or Catholic nationals in Andalucía.” Much of the work on Muslim converts and immigrants has focused on the city of Granada, but the traditional place of refuge of Granada, the Alpujarra, had yet to be studied in this light.* Due to Órgiva's position as the largest municipality in the Alpujarra region and a gateway to its more remote villages, it has long been known as “the capital of the Alpujarra.” In keeping with this, Órgiva is the epicenter for late 20th- and early 21st-century changes that are also seen, though to a lesser extent, in nearby areas of the Alpujarra.

Given the Alpujarra region's particular and evolving role in Spanish cultural history, there are layers of narratives about the Alpujarra and Órgiva. Historically, the Alpujarra has been the site of the entrance and exit of various empires, an intercultural contact portrayed particularly in works of historical fiction about the Moorish Other. Fittingly, the Alpujarra has also been frequently represented in travel narratives and ethnographies that spring from other types of cultural contact. More recently, Órgiva itself has been represented via memoirs, a collaborative collection of residents” testimonials, and various television shows. Taking Órgiva as a case study, this book has two goals: (1) to situate the latest written and televisual narratives about Órgiva against the backdrop of earlier narratives and analyze the portraits of Órgiva that they offer, and (2) to examine, in light of the silences in these recent narratives, the workings and texture of coexistence in the town— including its tensions and conflicting stories—by means of the narratives that those who live in the town tell about it. I use the residents’ expressions of their lived experience to consider how those with local roots integrate the transformation of their town, how the more recent arrivals portray their presence in the town, and how both groups negotiate difference and produce conceptions of coexistence. This allows me to analyze how representations of the town and everyday lived experience across difference formulate tolerance, in particular as it pertains to the various forms of migration that are part of the life of this Andalusian town. These narratives about coexistence have implications on the level of the autonomous community of Andalucia, the Spanish nation, and beyond.

The manifold narratives about Órgiva sometimes run counter to each other, but these ambivalences and contradictions reveal how tolerance is worked out and how more sustainable tolerance can be achieved. A deeper form of tolerance that is more likely to endure is based on both the recognition of mutual worthiness as human beings and of each side's compromises, interests, and types of power. The various communities that live in Órgiva are engaged in a process of assessing the gains and losses of different ways of coexisting. Although written and especially televisual narratives about the town use terms such as “tolerance” and “multiculturalism” to mask tensions and power differentials, by recognizing that toleration is an ongoing negotiation of what will and will not be accepted—of what is established as halal versus haram to use Islamic terminology—we can identify the points of contact that create robust, respect-based tolerance.

FIGURE 2: A map indicating the location of Órgiva within Spain (with the coast of Morocco and Algeria below).

FIGURE 3: A map indicating the location of Órgiva within the Alpujarra (darker in the larger map) and Andalucía.

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PU RALPUJARE /

FIGURE 4: The sign on one of the main roads into town, announcing “Órgiva, Pura Alpujarra [Pure Alpujarra].”

THE BACK STORY: AL-ANDALUS, CONVIVENCIA, AND ANDALUSIAN NATIONALISM

Understanding Órgiva and the Alpujarra in the present requires reviewing the region's lingering past: al-Andalus, the Reconquista, and the consolidation of the Spanish state through measures such as the expulsion of the moriscos (Muslim converts to Christianity) in the early 17th century. This historical backdrop is still present in the body of written narratives (travelogues, memoirs, and the like) about the Alpujarra, at least in works published through the 1950s, in television episodes about Órgiva, and in some community members’ attachment to the area. Al-Andalus refers to the intersection between a time period (711-1492) and a geographic territory (nearly all of the Iberian Peninsula), and thus to medieval Muslim-ruled Iberia. This period of Muslim rule was initiated by the conquests of the Umayyad Caliphate and continued under a variety of often rival dynasties and emirates, some headed by Arabs and some by Amazigh (Berber) leaders. Under Umayyad rule, mostly Imazighen (plural of Amazigh/Berbers) but also some Arabs slowly settled the Alpujarra. As early as the 11th century, the district of Orgiva was mentioned in a text by the geographer and historian al-'Udhri (Trillo San José 1990, 49). The Muslim Arabo-Amazigh conquerors brought agricultural advances to rural areas: Trillo San José (1994) indicates that records from the middle of the 10th century point to the Arabo-Amazigh impact on agriculture in the Alpujarra (175). They instituted terraced agriculture and a system of irrigation channels, both of which are still in use today. Meanwhile, the major cities of al-Andalus, most of them in what is today the region of Andalucia, were home to not only Muslims but Christians and Jews and flourished as centers of intellectual inquiry and artistic production.

Centuries after the political end of al-Andalus, with the Christian conquest of the entire peninsula, al-Andalus still functions as a popular symbol for both paradise lost and religious conflict, depending on whether it is viewed as a time of interfaith tolerance and cultivation of knowledge and the arts, or as a time of intolerance under either threatening Muslim power (Islamic Empire, Islam in Europe, etc.) or threatening Catholic consolidation of power (oppression and expulsion of Jews and Muslims, the Inquisition, etc.). A core element in the question of how to assess Muslim Iberia's cultural legacy is the ongoing debate regarding the place of al-Andalus in Spanish cultural history. One of the key figures in the early 20th-century manifestation of these debates was Américo Castro (1885-1972), a philologist and historian who hailed from Granada and, as a result of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), carried out most of his professional life in exile in the Americas. Castro is famous for having developed the concept of convivencia, literally: “living together.” Focusing his interpretation of medieval Iberia on the scholarly and artistic synergy between Christians, Jews, and Muslims that took place there, Castro proposed that these three faiths enjoyed a Muslim-led tolerance that he dubbed “la convivencia.” According to this interpretation, tolerance was one of several significant Muslim contributions to Spain’s unique cultural history. The main opposing narrative of al-Andalus from Castro’s time posited that the authentic Spanish identity was Gothic, Germanic, and Roman in origin—that is, purely European—and that the period of Muslim and Jewish presence was a detriment to the development of Spain that must be overcome.

Built upon Castro’s narrative of harmonious coexistence in al- Andalus, the term convivencia has taken on a life of its own and is often used to refer to a utopian vision of interfaith harmony. The idea of the “Spain of the three religions” (anachronistic, since it was not yet “Spain”) grew out of this and has become a catchphrase that is featured in a certain vein of Spanish historiography and in the promotion of tourism in Spain.’ The question of how much tolerance, and of what sort, there actually was in al-Andalus has led to many a scholarly study. One conclusion of this research is that the systems of rule in place in al-Andalus (in which conquered areas were given considerable freedom in exchange for taxes paid by non-Muslim religious communities) neither prevented certain kinds of discrimination and occasional religious violence, nor are analogous to modern political regimes. For these reasons, calls to “reinstate” the harmonies of convivencia in the present are problematic. However, as Christian Fernández indicates, in both the pre-modern and modern periods, one can find practices that are motivated by “a desire to accommodate rather than eradicate diversity.” Thus, while invocations of convivencia tend to ahistorically mythify interfaith harmony, they also reflect a persistent desire to find ways in which diversity and harmony can coexist. As contemporary nation-states grapple with tensions within their heterogeneous populations, liberals and progressives look to al- Andalus for inspiration.

The historical movements that are understood as the polar opposites of la convivencia are the Reconquista—the process of Christian kingdoms forming, conquering territories in the Peninsula, sometimes fighting amongst themselves, and eventually consolidating into a single kingdom, that was subsequently framed as a holy war of Spanish Catholics against Muslims—and, intertwined with it, the Inquisition." Given the gains of different Christian kingdoms in Iberia, by 1252 al- Andalus was reduced to the Emirate of Granada, an emirate of the Nasrid dynasty that itself was successively reduced from roughly half of today’s region of Andalucia and part of the region of Murcia down to about a third of today’s Andalucia. Muslim rule in Iberia ended in 1492 with the fall of that final holdout, the Emirate of Granada. As the Reconquista reduced and then eliminated Muslim-ruled areas, more Jews and Muslims lived under Christian rule. Many converted to Christianity in the face of decrees expelling unconverted Jews (1492) and unconverted Muslims (the early 1500s). Eventually, even converted Muslims (moriscos) were ousted through the final expulsion decrees (1609-14).

But between the fall of Granada and the final expulsion, the Alpujarra had a prominent role in Spanish history. The Alpujarra region was the first site of exile for the last Muslim ruler of al-Andalus, Boabdil (Abu ‘Abd Allah Muhammad XII), and the last site of Muslim uprisings against the Catholic Monarchs: the Rebellion of the Alpujarras (or Morisco Revolt) of 1499-1500 and that of 1568-71. During the Catholic Monarchs’ battles to conquer the Emirate of Granada (1482-91), the Alpujarra was the only area that was not occupied militarily by Christian forces (Trillo San José 1990, 49). Until the 1500s, the Alpujarra was known for its terraced agriculture and its sericulture: the nobles of the time (regardless of religion) prized the region's silk. These characteristics no doubt made the Alpujarra a worthy consolation prize for the ousted Boabdil. At the time of the Catholic Monarchs’ victory over the Emirate, as part of the Capitulations of Granada, Ferdinand and Isabel gave Boabdil as his fiefdom a territory in the Alpujarra, including the village of Órgiva. However, Boabdil only lived in the Alpujarra for a short time. In 1493, he sold his Alpujarran fiefdom back to the Catholic Monarchs and left for Fez.

The Capitulations of Granada also included stipulations protecting Muslims’ religious freedom and the continuation of their customs. However, these stipulations were only upheld by the Catholic Monarchs until 1499. In that year, when the Christian authorities broke the treaty of surrender by carrying out forced conversions and public burnings of Arabic manuscripts, Muslims in the Alpujarra rebelled against the Spanish authorities in what is known as the First Rebellion ofthe Alpujarra. The Castilians quashed the rebellion and bequeathed Órgiva to a Spanish military officer nicknamed “El Gran Capitán,” Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba (1453-1515), for his role in that victory (Trillo San José 1990, 49). The Castilians then gave the Muslims the choice of baptism or exile. Most accepted baptism, although an indeterminate number continued to live in Iberia as crypto-Muslims. That uprising was followed by the Second Rebellion of the Alpujarra and increasing socioeconomic tensions that led in 1609 to the first decree mandating the expulsion of the moriscos.

The momentum of the Reconquista and the Crusades created Spain's first footholds in North Africa (Melilla and Ceuta) and when Spain lost most of its New World colonies in the early 19th century, its attention then turned to colonization projects in North and West Africa. Spain’s colonial project in North Africa was justified via a concept related to convivencia. In a contradictory stance, during the first half of the 20th century, Spanish military and colonial authorities espoused the idea of a Spanish-Moroccan hermandad (brotherhood) rooted in al-Andalus as a way to rationalize Spanish presence in the Maghreb. Although the official nationalist ideology of the Franco dictatorship

(1939-75) was based on a rhetoric that explicitly invoked the spirit of the Reconquista and its mission to restore the unity of Spain through Catholicism, the Franco regime also embraced a vein of Spanish historical revisionism that, starting in the 1930s and continuing for several decades, posited that Iberia had been the site of a different type of Islam, one that reflected Hispanic influence. Hence, anachronistic

» c and appropriative terms such as “Muslim Spain,” “Spanish Islam,” and “Hispano-Arab” became common in academic circles, the media, and popular discourses." The rhetoric of Hispano-Arab hermandad was used to support a colonial campaign that resulted in Spain’s occupation of the Western Sahara (1884-1976), which has been claimed by Morocco, and Spain’s protectorate in two regions of Morocco (1912- 56): the northern Rif and the southern strip adjacent to the Western Sahara. Spanish colonization in North Africa included the cultural elements (the colony as the object of academic study and artistic representation) typical of French and British colonial ventures, but with the twist of the hermandad rhetoric that positioned Morocco and the Western Sahara as the “little brother” receiving Spanish tutelage. Alongside the development of Spain's colonial relationship with North Africa, in the late 19th century, Andalusian nationalism (andalucismo) arose, demonstrating an equally complex relationship with al-Andalus. The culmination of andalucismo during the late 20th-century transition to democracy then led to the return of the open practice of Islam in Andalucía and the Alpujarra. In the 19th century, the Alpujarra experienced some industrialization through the establishment of lead, silver, and fluorite mines that remained active through most of the 20th century.'? Together with this industry that was dependent on new technologies, the period also saw the burgeoning of new conceptions of political and community identity in the form of regional nationalisms. Spain has a long tradition of strong cultural and/or linguistic regions, many of which espouse forms of nationalism known as nacionalismos periféricos (peripheral or non-central nationalisms). Toward the end of the 19th century, many of these regions, among them Andalucía, witnessed Romanticism-inspired regionalist movements that promoted political autonomy on the basis of cultural difference from the other regions of the peninsula. While the andalucista (Andalusianist) movement saw different, mostly cultural manifestations during the following decades, it burgeoned after the Franco dictatorship (1939-75).

Spain underwent a deep and rapid cultural transformation in the post-dictatorship period. The Spanish transition to democracy that began with Franco’s death in 1975 included the establishment of a new political system and constitution (1978) as well as the outpouring of new and formerly suppressed artistic, social, and ideological movements. This surge of countercultural movements, known as La Movida (the Scene), which began in Madrid in 1980 and then manifested in other parts of Spain, responded to the end of years of oppression and the start of post-dictatorship economic growth with a spirit of freedom of expression that transgressed what had up until recently been taboo. As such, it entailed a reconfiguration of Spanish identity and cultural expression. This movement included, particularly in Andalucia, interest in the practice of Islam, a religious and lifestyle choice that was ideologically intertwined with the more strictly political side of the Spanish transition.

Alongside La Movida, in the post-dictatorship period the various regionalist and nationalist movements, which had been suppressed by the Franco regime, also experienced a resurgence. With the transition to democracy and the preparation of the 1978 constitution, which reorganized the country politically on the basis of Autonomous Communities, in 1976 the Partido Socialista Andaluz (Andalusian Socialist Party), later the Partido Andalucista, was established with the aim of demanding autonomy for Andalucia. It achieved this goal in 1981. From the perspective of supporters of regional nationalisms, Castilian centralism is a colonizing force. Among the regional nationalisms, that of Andalucia is positioned as both subordinated to centralist Spain and linked to al-Andalus. As a historically economically depressed region, Andalucia has sent laborers to other regions of Spain, where they often experienced the oppression of class and cultural hierarchies. This experience intensified Andalusian awareness of cultural differences from other Spaniards. Although within Europe

Spain's “Europeanness” is questioned, within a national framework, that element of “Africanness” (backwardness, barbarity, etc.) attributed to Spain is ascribed specifically to Andalucía. Hence the Spanish saying that defends against the French adage “Africa begins at the Pyrenees”: Andalucía es África (“Andalucía is Africa”).

With the post-dictatorship period’s rise in cultural and political movements centered on regional nationalisms, the invocation of al- Andalus as part of the andalucismo movement also intensified. Andalucismo includes highlighting and celebrating the characteristics of Andalusian culture that are understood to be a part of its Andalusi heritage. The prevailing ethno-nationalist view of Spanish history, and within it Spanish demography, is that all Jews and Muslims were expelled and the areas they had inhabited were repopulated through a policy of bringing in Christians from elsewhere in the peninsula and distributing the Muslims’ confiscated property among them. A contestatory account posits that sizable Muslim and Jewish populations assimilated enough to escape the notice of the Inquisition and stayed in Iberia.” According to some of these narratives, the remaining Muslims and Jews were relegated to working the lands of the Christian knights who had colonized the peninsula’s last Muslim kingdoms. Thus, andalucismo has included an identification with those most famously disenfranchised by powerful Castilians: the Moors.

As an economically depressed region that has been viewed from the outside as an extension of North Africa, the ideologues of andalucismo as well as certain veins of popular sentiment have embraced a moro (Moorish) connection. Whether by tracing a Moorish genealogy, using the Moor as a figure for the disenfranchised, or only carrying out a class analysis, key andalucista writers have pointed to Castilians and the central Spanish government as colonizers of Andalucia. These discourses, together with the partially overlapping geographic location, place names, and famous monuments, forge a strong link between Andalucia and al-Andalus that serves to heighten the perceived connection between the contemporary Spanish region and the former Muslim political and cultural entity. Andalucistas have often embraced the cultural achievements and splendor of al-Andalus in order to enjoy the compensatory fantasy of a glorious and powerful past, as well as a fighting spirit.‘ For instance, in 1918, Blas Infante (1885-1936), a musicologist and writer who is seen as the father of Andalusian nationalism, chose the green and white colors of the Andalusian flag because green was the color of the Umayyads and white that of the Almohads, the caliphates that represent periods of grandeur and power in that region.'*

Through at least the 1980s, there was a notably Islamist vein in Andalusian nationalism, as witnessed by the political party Liberación Andaluza (Andalusian Liberation), established in the mid-1980s and linked to La Yama‘a Islámica de Al-Andalus (The al-Andalus Islamic Group), a convert cultural organization that seeks to promote Islam as integral to Andalusian cultural heritage (Stalleart 1999).'* This link between andalucismo and Islam as a religious practice (in contrast with the broader focus on Islamicate civilizations as accomplished) is intertwined with the cultural forces that led to the rise of Spanish converts to Islam in the post-Franco period.” Christiane Stalleart indicates that the “neoconversos,” (in reference to, and contrast with, the earlier converts in medieval Iberia) while not forming a uniform group, arose as a phenomenon of the first years after the dictatorship, as part of the ideological opening of the newly democratic Spain (Stalleart 1999, 189).

Given the groundwork laid by andalucismo, during the intense social and economic changes of the transition to democracy, the early convert movement was particularly strong in Andalucía. Charles Hirschkind, in his work on converts to Islam in the city of Granada, states that many andalucista activists themselves converted to Islam and that “today Andalusia has the most rapidly growing community of converts in all of Europe” (Hirschkind 2014, 234). As Beebe Bahrami explains, those southern Spanish converts were “almost all middle-class intellectuals who, dissatisfied with Catholicism and secular ideologies, and alienated by Spain’s sudden rapid economic and political changes, sought a new yet not entirely foreign ideology to offer meaning to their lives” (Bahrami 1998, 126). The convert community is particularly active in the city of Granada (Hirschkind 2014, 234) and that community has links to the Alpujarra. Rosón Lorente explains that the development of the Muslim convert community in Granada, which took officially recognized form in the mid-1980s, ran parallel to, and was intertwined with, the development of hippie communes in the Granadan Alpujarra (335).'* Specifically, a number of hippies (or “alternatives,” as some of them prefer to be named) from the Alpujarra converted to Islam and moved to Granada to join the convert community there (336-38). Based on what converts in Órgiva told me, some of these hippie converts to Islam later returned to the Alpujarra. As noted by Bahrami (1998, 127) and others, the familiarity of Spaniards and particularly Andalusians with Islam, albeit filtered through Orientalist and political andalucista lenses, has made them more likely, when searching for a meaningful ideology, to choose Islam.”

HISTORICAL MEMORY AND CONTEMPORARY CONFLICTS: NARRATIVES ABOUT AL-ANDALUS IN IMMIGRATION AND CULTURAL POLITICS

The narratives about medieval and early modern Spain that constitute Spanish historical memory contribute directly to current socio-political tensions surrounding immigration, the practice of Islam, and nationalism. Another aspect of Spain’s transition to democracy was the negotiation of its political and cultural relationship with Europe, and Spain’s migration history has a central role in this relationship. In 1982, amid heated debate within Spain, the country joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) decades after its founding. Similarly, Spain was a relative latecomer to European integration. It was not part of “the inner six” who established the European Communities in 1951, nor “the outer seven” who formed the European Free Trade Association. Rather, it joined the European Communities (which later developed into the European Union) in 1986.

Amid the other transformations witnessed in late 20th-century Spain, within the framework of human mobility, the country rapidly changed from being a sending country to being a receiving country, and Andalucia in particular shifted from being a region of outmigration and emigration to one of immigration. Until the late 1970s, Spaniards, and especially those from rural areas, were migrants. As part of the late 19th-century European emigration to the Americas, many Spaniards left for Hispano-America. Later, in the 1950s, an intranational migration wave saw many leave impoverished rural areas for work in large cities. When the Franco government legalized extranational emigration in 1959, the trend of migrants leaving Andalucía and other depressed regions to work elsewhere in Europe continued until the early 1970s. Experiences as labor migrants elsewhere in Europe often served to heighten awareness of civilizational hierarchies within Western Europe itself. But the direction of movement switched as a result of Spain's economic boom (“The Spanish Miracle” of 1959-74) and entry into what would become the European Union.

In the 1980s, a rise in North African immigration to Spain added to the questioning of Spain's relationship to Europe and the legacy of al-Andalus. Before 1985, Moroccans did not need visas to enter Spain, and many young Moroccan men went to Spain temporarily to work in agriculture and industry. Paradoxically, Spain's integration into the European Union led to a dramatic rise in North African immigration to the country. The European Schengen Convention, a 1990 supplement to the earlier Schengen Agreement, dissolved internal European borders, thereby making entry through Spain even more desirable for migrants who could then use the country as a stepping stone to other points in Europe. With time, many new migrants decided to stay in Spain, and in the 1990s, the number of Moroccan migrants in Spain began to rise significantly. For this reason, until 2002, Moroccans were the largest immigrant group in Spain. Since then, in yearly statistics they have typically been the second largest group, closely following Romanians or Ecuadoreans, and occasionally still are the largest group (España en cifras).” These changes led the European Union to pressure Spain to intensify its policing of borders, a material expression of the broader pressure for Spain to “police” its cultural borders in terms of building and maintaining a European conception of national identity.

In The Return of the Moor, Daniela Flesler explains the particular cultural location of North African migrants in Spain as follows: “the current rejection of Moroccan immigrants is related to the fact that they are the one group most directly implicated in the question of Spanish identity in relationship to Africa” (3). On the one hand, as Flesler notes, the rejection of Maghrebi immigrants is a manifestation of what scholars such as Étienne Balibar, Martin Barker, Paul Gilroy (1990), and Pierre-André Taguieff have defined as cultural racism, new racism, or differentialist racism, terms used to name prejudices and discrimination that are based on cultural rather than biological differences. Although biological racism is generally rejected today in Western Europe, expressions of cultural racism point to some cultures being superior to others and certain cultures being intrinsically incompatible. Muslim immigrants in particular are seen as holding values and following traditions that are understood as being incompatible with democracy, modernity, and secularism. On the other hand, the rejection of these immigrants also results from their perceived connection to Spain's past: “in the Spanish collective imaginary,” North African immigrants “become the embodiment of everything there is to fear from their history, the ghosts of a past that has not stopped haunting them, the return of the repressed” (Flesler 80). As Flesler skillfully argues, this haunting consists of both the perception of Maghrebi immigration as a return of the invaders of old as well as anxieties regarding how to establish clear boundaries with an Other that is so similar to the Self (195-96). Since at least the 1990s, right-wing Spanish populists have exploited and exacerbated this troubled relationship with Maghrebis by fomenting fears of a Muslim reconquest of Spain, primarily in the form of Maghrebi immigrants. With regard to Andalucía in particular, Mikaela Rogozen-Soltar (2017), in her study on relations between European converts and Maghrebi migrants in the city of Granada, points out that Andalusians’ marginality within Spain and Europe makes religious affiliation and immigration more sensitive topics, as there is a heightened desire to differentiate from those viewed as marginal (13).

In comparison with France, whose foulard affair has become known internationally, in Spain there have only been a limited number of issues regarding Muslims of immigrant origin being prohibited from wearing a hijab or headscarf to school. However, there have been violent manifestations of anti-immigrant sentiment, namely, in February 2002 in the town of El Ejido, a 75-minute drive from Órgiva, and in other towns in surrounding southwestern Almería. Western Almería province is known for its greenhouses made of plastic sheeting, where much of Spain's fruits and vegetables are grown. This agricultural work is largely carried out by migrants, most of whom are Moroccan.” After two murders were committed by Maghrebi migrants within a few days, another fatal incident led to an aggressive outpouring. The protests reacting to this third incident, in which a Moroccan with mental health issues killed a young Spanish woman in El Ejido, developed into 24 hours of violent xenophobic unrest that included the vandalism of a mosque and immigrant businesses and the burning of cars. Residents of Spanish origin also attacked Maghrebi immigrants with rocks, bats, and metal bars. Riot police had to come in to quell the situation and there were 22 wounded—yet no out-ofcontrol protesters were arrested (Constenla and Torregrosa).