The research work has been supervised by the professor of the Department of Sociology of the UGR, Julio Iglesias de Ussel. The author, Rosa Mª Soriano Miras, has described, analysed and interpreted the before-and-after of women immigration from Morocco to Spain: why they have left their native country, why they have chosen Spain, how people received them and how they adapted to the new situation.
Spain has experienced an exponential increase of migrations, which leads to new demands and expectations of future. The usual sociological studies are focused on exclusion. The main novelty of this work of the UGR is the contribution to the identification of the keys for the integration of immigrant women, “listening to their own voice”. They have used a technique for data analysis new in Spain, the Grounded Theory.
No explicatory theory, in the national and international ambit, deals with the success of immigration in the recipient society, “because it has not been the central object of research work, or because this phenomenon is relatively new in areas such as Andalusia and the west of Almeria”, points out professor Soriano. For this reason the work presents the main scientific perspectives about the phenomenon of migrations focusing on the Spanish context and, particularly, in the town of El Ejido (Almería).
Different, the same
The research work structures the framework of the thesis. For this reason, they have prepared the life histories of different immigrant Moroccan women, who have been gathered in three variants: tradition, balance and transgression. Such typology is based in the response of Moroccan women, through emigration, to their condition of subordinate to men, customs and the religious and civil laws y civil of Morocco.
Soriano maintains that “in the histories gathered as ‘tradition’, there is a latent denunciation of the situation of Morocco. With ‘balance’, the process of secularization appears with strength, and women demand their identity and rights. Lastly, transgression breaks with the purest Moroccan tradition”.
The success of displacement
The theory to explain the success is fruit of a process of settlement. “The process is carried out through the juxtaposition of four planes. In the structural plane the subject searches the rights and freedoms that he can not find in his native country. Then the migratory project reaches the individual plane, and after the frustration of the expectations (as they do not find in Spain the facilities they imagined in Spain), there is a change of orientation, avoiding dejection and loneliness”, points out the author of the thesis.
The help of the caring networks among Spanish and Moroccan is central in this process, and the social plane is essential in the way to success. Lastly, a prospective plane identifies the meaning of life understood through family in a continuous search of family welfare. The success of the migratory process lies in the juxtaposition of these planes. It does not mean that the way is over, quite to the opposite, it is the start of new objectives, desires and projects, which opens new ways in the research of a phenomenon as new and old at the same time as people displacement.
Further information: Prof Rosa María Soriano Miras. Phone numbers: 958 244140 / 600 013087. E-mail: rsoriano@ugr.es
