Parties of Muslim Persuasion and the Left in Ceuta, Spain

Abstract

Wholly unknown to some Spaniards and many Europeans, Ceuta is a small Spanish exclave on Morocco’s North African coast, directly across from the Rock of Gibraltar. For the people of Ceuta, their land has been unquestionably Spanish since 1640 when Portugal ceded the territory to Spain. Portugal had previously captured it from its Muslim inhabitants in 1415 as part of the Christian Reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula. For most of its history, Ceuta served as a military fortification and prison. It was not until the late nineteenth century that a civil society emerged in Ceuta. Then, as Spain’s colonial ambitions in Northern Africa increased in the beginning of the twentieth century, so did the nonmilitary population of Ceuta. Spanish and Moroccan workers f locked to the region to construct the infrastructure of the Spanish Protectorate, which lasted from 1912 until 1956 when Morocco gained its independence from France and Spain. After independence, many Moroccans continued to live and raise their families in Ceuta. Many of Ceuta’s Moroccans were essentially stateless because they were not official citizens of Spain or Morocco. Nonetheless, many moved back and forth across the Spanish Moroccan border with ease until the end of the twentieth century when Spanish immigration control tightened, and the European Union financed the construction of a multimillion-dollar fence along the border.