Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
This is not Spain! This is a North-European colony! That's what I think. I
think so.
Catrin:
Swedes, Brits…
Britt-Marie:
… Dutch, Germans, Russians. It is incredibly international. It is as inter-
national as London. And it is probably not a coincidence that I live in these
places,becauseIwantaninternationalmilieu.That'swhereIfeelmosthappy.
If I'd lived in Sevilla or Jerez it would have been a totally different thing.
Then you would have had to confront yourself with the Spanish culture in a
different way.
Like Britt-Marie, the women interviewed living in the Spanish Sunbelt socialized
primarily with other Northern European migrants from similar social segments who
shared the embodiment of “structured invisibility,” thus separating them from “visual”
migrants, but also from Spaniards. These networks were not defined as migrant com-
munities but as international communities that consist of overlapping and connecting
relations between British, French, Scandinavian, and Dutch migrants in this particular
partofAndalucía,butlesssowithSpaniards.“TherearenoSpaniardshere,”Britt-Marie
says.
Ofcourse,itisabitboring,butontheotherhand,thatwasn'tthereasonformov-
ing to Spain, to become a Spanish woman, it was rather a question of lifestyle.
And then I think the cultures are very different. You have more in common with
English people than Spanish people.
WhydoesBritt-MariefeelshehasmoreincommonwithEnglishpeoplethanSpanish
people?Whydosomepeoplefeelclosetoeachotherbutdistantfromothers?Whenana-
lyzing how different nationalities, such as Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch, and British life-
style migrants tend to cluster in southern Spain, I use Sara Ahmed's (2007) concept of
orientations toward whiteness, likeness, and institutions as meeting points where some
bodies tend to feel comfortable as they
already belong here
. Whiteness is a position
created by “likeness” and “shared attributes” that bring some people together in a for-
eign context. As Ahmed (2007: 157) puts it, “[w]hen we describe institutions as 'being'
white (institutional whiteness), we are pointing to how institutional spaces are shaped
bytheproximityofsomebodiesandnotothers:whitebodiesgather,andcoheretoform
the edges of such spaces.” Following Ahmed, I argue that the “institutionalization of
whiteness” in southern Spain recruits subjects who feel they are part of an international
community, but that results in a division between migrants from Northern Europe, other
migrants from North Africa, as well as locals from Spain or Andalucía. Being part of
an international community is not associated with (demands for) integration into Span-
