Coming of Age in Madrid

Book excerpt: Coming of Age in Madrid is a longitudinal study of twenty-seven Moroccan youth who migrated to Madrid as unaccompanied minors, passed their adolescence in the Spanish child-care system, and embarked on their lives as young adults; interviews were conducted over a period of six years in Spain and Morocco. The stories begin with narrators lives in Morocco, contextualizing their migratory experience, then follows them children traveling alone as they across the Strait of Gibraltar and make their way to Madrid; the study also engages with those who were deported, crossing the Strait once again as they were returned to Morocco. Using qualitative interviews to capture narrators accounts in their own words, this oral history examines their identity trans/formation, integration, and acculturation in Spain. Their individual voices and their collective wisdom contribute to an understanding of their experiences and by extension, that of unaccompanied child migrants everywhere, revealing larger lessons to be learned. Documenting their transition into adulthood, the book poses the crucial question, What becomes of unaccompanied migrant minors when they come of age? Unaccompanied minor migration is on the rise throughout the world, it is the new normal. As Spain and other nations grapple with increasing numbers of unaccompanied children on their borders, the importance of this study has immediate relevance for government policies and migration research. The history of unaccompanied Moroccan minors coming of age in Madrid contributes to the broader geographical discussion by responding to calls for contextualized, micro-scale, local research and the foregrounding and centralizing of the young migrants themselves.