Case Study: Moroccan Immigrant Youth in the Basque Country
In the upcoming sections I will expose the results obtained in a larger research, where I have explored the ways in which the transcultural process of acculturation happens. This research has been made through a case study with a group of 20 immigrant teenagers in the province of Gipuzkoa, in the northern Spanish region of the Basque Country. This region was chosen because I wanted to implement the study in a region within Spain, where migratory phenomena have recently taken place. The fact that the Basque Country is culturally and linguistically different from other Spanish autonomous communities was also taken into account and, in fact, is one of the main contrasts. I chose to work with young members from the Moroccan community mainly for to 3 reasons: firstly, adolescence is a period when developmental issues raised by migration are of particular salience. Their experiences during and after migration involve changes that influence their transition from childhood to adulthood; making important decisions about who they are and who they hope to be in the future i.e., they are acquiring their identities. Secondly, all of my informants were over 18, but they were unaccompanied immigrant minors[v] as defined by Bravo Rodríguez (2005) following his arrival to Spain/the Basque Country. This group stands out among other immigrants groups due to their special social status of being minors, having no supportive social structures (namely, families), and being Muslims. Thirdly, I as an immigrant in the Basque Country was looking at a very different ethnic culture than my own. This choice allows for much homogeneous results that permit to test the theoretical concepts better.
For our purposes I departed from a holistic logic, so I considered the semiosphere behavior, as well as the connection of its parts, as a reflection of the interaction of both levels: diachronic (intertwined semiospheres of different times) and synchronic (different levels). Herein, I depart from a holistic conception of an ethnic semiotic space, which is crossed by multiple boundaries on several layers, languages and texts. The same applied for both ethnic spaces (Basque and Moroccan).
This set of Moroccan teenagers crossed the boundaries from their native semiosphere towards the Basque larger semiosphere in order to establish relations of convergence with the Basques. Immigrants — semiotic monads, as I pointed out above, require a minimum of 2 codes in order to establish a dialogue with other semiotic monads. Nevertheless, there is another condition for establishing this relationship, and its called dialogue. A dialogic situation has to be pinpointed before: “the semiotic situation precedes the instruments of semiosis” (Lotman 2001, p. 143-144). The dialogic situation that we found in the case of Basques is the need for multicultural conditions in the Basque Country; with this I mean the need of manpower in the Basque Country before the economical growth that it has experienced since the nineties: a quick industrialization, the lack of qualified manpower and the decrease in the birthrate, combined with the immanent need of a modern European multicultural society, established the conditions for dialogue with immigrants from several countries. On the other hand, from the point of view of Moroccans, we observe the need of improving their living conditions, their economical situation and the dreams fulfillment. All these matters are also mixed up with the natural trend of cultures to open up opportunities for semiotic-crossing boundaries and the generation of new meanings. When this immigrant youth crosses the boundary, there is an exchange of information with the host semiosphere whose outcome is a transformation of the dialoguing texts. Dialogue also presupposes asymmetry and it can found in 2 ways: First in the difference between the languages that participants in dialogue use, secondly, in the changing directions of the flowing and ebb of information, where participants alternate positions from addressers to addressees producing discrete dialogic situations (Lotman 2001, p. 143). Since these information exchanges will be assimilated, subsequent acts of translation will occur. Translation was conceived as mechanisms that form the ground for thinking activity: “the elementary act of thinking is translation” and “the elementary mechanism of translation is dialogue” (Lotman, 2001). Translations contribute to gradual or explosives re-shapings in the self-descriptions of Moroccan youth.
When our informants are inserted in new environments, where they are forced to grapple with intercultural communication,[vi] they must negotiate their sense of identity in order to face the everyday life, which is imposed on them. This not only implies dealing with new people, spaces or languages, but also confronting new discourses and cultural practices that include ideological, economical, legal and political issues. Additionally, there is another important issue, which is related with the question of identification by an other in the larger society (in this case, the Other may be personified by Spaniards/ Basques/ another immigrants from the same ethnic group or from different ethnic groups, namely Latin-Americans, Romanians, Gypsies or Africans). Clear outcomes of these processes are the constraints of ethnic categories, and the inherent exposition to discrimination or racism by other people. In this manner our Moroccan youth, as any other set of immigrants, has to readjust not only their identities but also the ways in which they express them. How they show their identities is up to the contexts in which they are coping with. Among other categories, they are: teenagers, immigrants, Moroccans and Muslims, and must balance their performance in both interpersonal and intrapersonal levels. Concerning this issue, Hala Mahmoud (2009) argues that people tend to dissent in what they manifest intrapersonally and interpersonally because the manifold identities people have, as well as how do they perceive them. She stresses the role that feelings play in the processes of internalization and externalization, including the transition from one level to another (Mahmoud 2009, p. 287). I agree with her in the role feelings have in the performance of identities, however, my point here is that in order to show how Moroccan immigrants distinguish the development of their feelings for re-ordering their identities, we must turn to autocommunication.