Garam Kwon

GARAM KWON, then a graduate student at City University of New York Graduate Center, New York, New York, was awarded funding in April 2022 to aid research on “Andalusian Waterworld and the Formation of Internationalism across the Strait of Gibraltar (1945-1956),” supervised by Dr. Leo Coleman. This historical-anthropological research examined how local sociomaterial worlds and the labor 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 under the late Spanish Protectorate in Morocco (1945-1956). Despite the vibrancy of working class-led, internationalist movements in the region, 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 exclusionary nationalisms. This project involved archival research and in-depth interviewing with former residents of Tangier and their descendants to document Andalusian involvement in North African water worlds, tracing transnational political ideas and personal connections built through involvement in ordinary water infrastructures in Tangier, while exploring how these formed a material basis for situated enactments of internationalism. Through six months of archival and ethnographic research in Spain and Morocco, this project explored how Andalusians built ethnic, class, and environmental relations across classes and ethnic boundaries through water labour, the effects these relations had on political practices of internationalism, and how post-colonial Tangier and everyday Moroccan life have been shaped by these relations.