Melilla’s Decada Negra: How Spain’s Incorporation into the Core of the Capitalist World System after Franco’s Dead Shaped the Gendered and Racialized Inequality in the Spanish-Moroccan Borderscape

Drawing on ethnographic and qualitative material collected during fieldwork between 2021 and 2023 in the Spanish exclave of Melilla, I explore how Spain's integration into the core of the capitalist world system (Wallerstein) has shaped the social reproduction in the Spanish-Moroccan border region and how capitalism continues to shape inequality in the city to this day. I proceed in two steps. First, I examine the historical changes that took place in Melilla and the neighboring region of Nador between Franco's death 1975 and Spain's integration into the EU 1986. This phase is remembered in Spain as the peaceful Trasición to democracy, but is referred to in Melilla as the Decada Negra and even as a phase of Apartheid Light. Based on interviews with contemporary witnesses and historical documents, I show how violence and quasi-colonial oppression shaped the birth of Spanish democracy in Melilla. The core of the struggle at the time was whether the Muslim Melillenses should be granted access to Spanish citizenship and thus to the advantages associated with EU membership.

Secondly, the legacy of this phase is traced up to the present. Today, the border regime that came hand in hand with democratic capitalism shapes life in the exclave and the Nador region. The concrete form of urban inequality along the lines of gender, race and religion is directly related to capitalist accumulation. My research shows that the exploitation of the rural Moroccan population as well as the exploitation of the Muslim Melillenses in the labor markets of Melilla and southern Spain leads to socioeconomic inequalities that are compensated in female led care networks. By reconstructing these, I show how the implementation of modern capitalism both produced a certain form of gendered inequality and led to a racial segregation even more rigorous than under Franco's rule.