Garam Kwon

This historical-anthropological research examines how local sociomaterial worlds and the labour migrations that sustain them also shape political practices and concepts of internationalism, with a specific focus on Andalusian migrant labourers who worked in the International Zone of Tangier as water carriers, as well as the wider economy and ecology of water in the later period of Spanish Protectorate in Morocco (1945-1956). Despite the vibrancy of the working class-led, internationalist movements in the region during the 1950s, the fragmentation of historiographies along Moroccan/Spanish national lines after the Spanish Civil War has meant that historians have seldom explored Moroccan and Spanish solidarity against European imperialism and the rise of nationalisms. To study such a significant and understudied history, this project attends to Andalusian waterworld, their ideas and connections built through the water regime in Tangier as a basis for ideas and a practical, lived network of connections that drove the rise and enactment of internationalism. Through twelve-months of archival and ethnographic research in Spain and Morocco, this project explores how Andalusians built their ethnic, class, and environmental relations through water labour and how and why these labour experiences articulated with internationalist ideas and practices.