Unboxing Spain’s Colonial Past in the Rif

Abstract

In the Northern Moroccan city of Al Hoceima, Spanish and Moroccan his- tory of the 20th and twenty-first century converge. The protracted anti-/colonial war fought between parties from both territories gave rise to the bloody Spanish Civil War and Francoist dictatorship and formed a basis for post-independence mi- litary oppression in the Rif uprisings 1958/59. A growing body of ethnographic work focuses on memory work on both topics in this area from Moroccan perspectives and with eyes on oppressed subjects (Aixelà-Cabré 2022, Nahhass 2022). Drawing on recent work on ‘implicated subjects’ (Rothberg 2019), I argue that it is also ne- cessary to consider ongoing trans-Mediterranean and Spanish memory activism in order to fully understand the workings and duress of colonialism in Spain and Nort- hern Morocco. To that end, the following paper analyzes archival practices about colonial Alhucemas and postcolonial Hoceima surrounding one private collection among this last generation of Spanish colonizers. It builds on fieldwork I conducted among former Spanish residents of Al Hoceima. As children and young adults, they grew up in relative colonial freedom under the totalitarian Franco regime. As adults, they witnessed two transitions: the transition to Moroccan independence 1956 and the transition to Spanish democracy from 1978 onwards, and many of them engage in collecting practices surrounding these transitions. This paper outlines how objects circulate in and out of one of their archives and how publics congregate around them. Through the objects, Former Residents, Spanish institutions, Spanish and Rif- fian actors become actors and publics who enter in relationships of co-operation without consensus about a shared narrative of perpetrators, victims and history at large. Three contested issues are made to travel through the analyzed collection: a continuously invoked notion of convivencia, (architectural) traces of a colonial past in the Hoceima cityscape and administrative and social secrets of mutual surveil- lance. I am interested in how these issues form part of a boundary infrastructure of memory work between Spain and Hoceima (Star and Griesemer 1989, Star and Bowker 2017, Schubert 2017). This working paper will serve as an intermediary step to explore competing and shared notions of victimhood, forms of co-operation and the creation of transborder publics around the entangled histories of life on both shores of the Mediterranean.