Melilla - París - Casablanca. Quemar fronteras, una etnografía con jóvenes harraga

Abstract

This dissertation is a multi-situated ethnography that has accompanied the harraga youth, young Moroccan migrants who have spent nights hiding in the ports of the border enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla and who have been detained and arrested by the police. Young UFM [MENA] who have lived in childhood protection centres and on the streets, who have sneaked onto boats and who are now travelling around Europe. In this thesis I defend harraga as a process of subjectivation that emerges in the trajectories of young Moroccans on the move to Europe in the relationship between the Moroccan historical, political, economic, social, and cultural context; the discretionary transnational governmentality of movement and youth; and the practices executed by these young people in their migratory itinerary. The harraga as a process of subjectivation does not appear exclusively in the young people in dialogue with this work, but is linked to a process of social remembrance, a collective memory by which young Moroccans on the move to Europe become a collective subaltern subject. These young harraga have taught me a specific way of understanding [male] youth and irregularised migration. In their practices, experiences, and anecdotes, I have found frictions with hegemonic ideas of nation-state, border, and youth. All in all, I believe that the protagonists of this work can teach us about the shortcomings of our protection systems, about the injustices done to racialised and impoverished youth, and the inequalities in access to the global movement