Refugee women in contemporary Spain.: Taking shelter where people once fled.

Abstract

The case study of a group of refugee women in contemporary Spain sheds light on the present experience of flight and resettlement from a gendered perspective. It is also functional to evaluate the importance of historical memory of forced displacement in fostering the adaptation and inclusion of current involuntary migrants in the host societies. The main thesis of this research is that the female experience of involuntary migration is influenced by distinctive gendered factors, which must be attentively examined to reconstruct a fully comprehensive picture of present refugee flows. Moreover, this paper stresses the crucial role of historical memory in enhancing refugees’ adaptation to the new reality in the receiving country.\nIn this research, Spain constitutes not only the political and social framework but also the historical context in which the narratives of flight and relocation of the aforementioned group of contemporary female refugees are placed. Women taking shelter in this country nowadays after escaping violence and conflicts share the same trauma as millions of Spanish women who were forced to flee during and after the Spanish Civil War. Reflecting on this parallelism places contemporary humanitarian crises, which are mainly analysed from a political science point of view, in the right historical perspective. The data collected showed that sharing past experiences of forced migrations between recent refugees from non-European countries and the host community in Spain, which itself was compelled to migrate in the previous century, is crucial to raise social awareness and fight marginalization. In addressing the above-mentioned objectives, this research adopts an interdisciplinary approach, which combines historical investigation with anthropological, sociological, and political analysis.\nThe contribution of this paper is twofold. Firstly, this article emphasises gender dynamics in refugee streams today as in the past, which continue to be overlooked even though women represent half of the over one hundred million forcibly displaced persons around the world. Secondly, it stresses the historical dimension of forced displacements, that the scholarship has substantially neglected, by matching similarities of personal experiences through storytelling between former and current involuntary migrants.