Morcilla negra, sellos republicanos y clubes españoles: comunidad, identidad y nostalgia entre emigrantes españoles en el Reino Unido

Abstract

Based on oral history testimonies provided by Spaniards who emigrated to the United Kingdom during the Franco dictatorship and written in the form of a reflective investigative journal, this paper first explores the ways in which these informants remember their efforts to become quickly acculturated and successfully incorporated into British society, something that was often done at the expense of preventing, rather than encouraging, the formation of Spanish migrant communities. In this way, the paper reconsiders commonly held assumptions relating to migrants' tendency to cluster around ethnic communities which supposedly impede or delay their integration in the host society. Secondly, from a methodological perspective, the paper discusses the usefulness and appropriateness of combining an oral history approach with research techniques from other disciplines, in particular, ethnographic observations of the informants' present spaces and acts of collective participation, for example, in migrant clubs and associations, which, combined with oral history testimonies, allow us to connect and contrast the ways in which informants remember their pasts and live the present.

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