Josefina Domínguez-Mujica

Migrating Abroad to Get Ahead: The Emigration of Young Spanish Adults During the Financial Crisis (2008–2013)

Recent demographic trends in the population of Spain, as in other Mediterranean countries, show a period of high net immigration in the transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century. In 2008, with the onset of the recession and the weakening of the Spanish job market, a new period of net emigration began. This phase has little in common with past trends, as two new types of primary actors have entered the scene: on the one hand, former immigrants who return to their home countries or develop different adaptation strategies, shifting back and forth between them as necessary, using their transnational connections and making migration processes more flexible; and on the other hand, Spanish youth and young adults who have been unable to find jobs in Spain, at least not ones commensurate with their skills and education. The emigration process of the second group—young skilled Spanish workers—is analyzed in this chapter. This work is based on a qualitative survey conducted in 2013 with a group of 170 informants obtained by snowball sampling, although we have also used other quantitative and qualitative sources to explore this topic in greater depth.

Postcolonial migrations and diasporic linkages between Latin America and Japan and Spain

In the late 1980s, both Japan and Spain revised their legislation to confer preferential immigration rights to citizens from former colonies or their own diasporic descendants based on historical, cultural or ethnic belonging to the ancestral homeland. During the economic crisis, Spain, in 2008, and Japan, in 2009, reversed their policies through a government-sponsored voluntary return program for these preferred migrants. When the economy recovered, Japan in 2013 revisited its return migration program, resulting in pendular migrations driven by politics and macro-economic trends. This suggests that historical or cultural ties that favor the citizens of former colonies and diasporic communities have reinforced two-way transoceanic migratory processes, thereby contributing to strengthening ‘old migration geographies.’

On the trail of social relations in the colonial Sahara: a postcolonial reading

ABSTRACT The Atlantic coast of the Sahara Desert was belatedly colonised by Spain. The paternalistic nature of this process and the collaboration of Sahrawi tribal leaders produced a specific type of colonial relations. The military hierarchy of colonial structures overlapped with the social stratification of Sahrawi tribes. Yet outside the upper echelons of Sahrawi authorities and Spanish military officers, daily life in the colony was defined by interactions among workers who performed the less lucrative jobs, Spanish immigrants from the Canary Islands as well as members of the indigenous population. Given their similar social status, four decades after the Spanish decolonisation (1975), we can still recognise the feelings that Sahrawi people inspire among Canarian returnees and the Sahrawis’ recollections of Canarian settlers, proving that colonial relations are never simple but ambivalent and open to new interpretations, especially when they intersect with other categories such as social class. Informed by postcolonial studies, our analysis of in-depth interviews conducted in the Canary Islands and the Sahara over the last ten years reveals the affective bond shared by colonisers and colonised at the bottom of the social hierarchy, allowing us to identify colonial memory as a cornerstone of social and cultural geography.