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Border enclaves examines the Spanish enclave of Melilla as a prism for understanding Europe’s contemporary dislocations. Based on over a decade of ethnographic research, it explores how borders are enforced, contested and inhabited in a city suspended between Africa and Europe, colonial legacies and modern regimes. Through a polyphonic narrative following smugglers, migrants, teachers and politicians, it reveals how everyday practices and symbolic performances shape life in the enclave. Selective visibility—who is seen or erased—structures authority and exclusion.
Situating Melilla within broader processes like Spain’s colonial history and Europe’s border restructuring, the book argues that its fragmented sovereignties and external dependencies make it a paradigmatic site for grasping Europe’s precarious margins. It calls for an ethnographic lens attuned to dislocation as both lived experience and analytic tool.
‘In the hands of a gifted ethnographer such as Laia Soto Bermant, stories about a place such as Melilla challenge so many of the taken for granted presuppositions of scholarship on borders, on being European or North African, on religious co-habitation, on the spaces in between. To read this book is to be transported into a nest of contradictions that ever so satisfyingly reveal how fragile and thus transformable modern-day social classification can be.’
– Ilana Gershon, Rice University, USA
‘Written with compassion and precision, Soto-Bermant demonstrates the power of ethnography to untangle the complex co-production of African and European state-projects and border regimes. Centred on the voices and experiences of those who inhabit, pass through and govern the political and economic cross-roads that is Melilla, the work traces the constitution and tense equilibrium of divergent national imaginaries and religious identities. Complicating mass-media depictions of humanitarian crisis by revealing the scope and subtleties of bureaucratic violence pursued in the name of national integration, Soto-Bermant’s exceptional study is of value to anthropology, political science, geography, migration studies and humanitarian practice.’
– Brenda Chalfin, University of Florida, USA
Introduction
1 Mystery of Africa, history of Spain
2 The people without history
3 The border spectacle
4 Children of the street
5 The end of a frontier economy
6 The criminal underworld
Conclusion
References