Abstract
The title of this volume points to the sense that Gibraltarians are not quite as British as they might appear to be at first sight and to raise an interrogative glance at the assumption that their Britishness is somehow given rather than having evolved over time. It also refers to a physical border between Gibraltar and Spain that has created an increased sense of shared identity, a “deep territorialisation” (Haller, Gelebte Grenze Gibraltar: Transnationalismus, Lokalität und Identität in kulturanthropologischer Perspektive. Wiesbaden: Deutscher Universitäts-Verlag, 2000: 79), and the creation of a hitherto non-existent national identity and national consciousness. The border is experienced bodily through the frustrations and petty harassments that typify a border crossing and these experiences produce and reinforce a disidentification with Spain and all things Spanish. Over time, the economic and political advantages of being on one side of the border as well as growing anti-Spanishness have been converted into pro-Britishness as Gibraltarians asserted their difference from the people on the other side. There is no denying the deep feelings of Gibraltarians but such sentiments are not simply emotional responses to events but also pragmatic ones: the border and Britishness have represented economic and political security, the two pillars of British Gibraltarian identity. Both of these pillars will be rudely shaken by Brexit.
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Notes
- 1.
It is no longer used in Scotland and Northern Ireland and by the Thames Valley and West Yorkshire police among others.
- 2.
See Stuart Ward’s Embers of Empire research project (http://embersofempire.ku.dk/) and forthcoming book with Cambridge University Press.
- 3.
This is doubtless an attempt at a witty reference to its famous 1990 headline, “Up Yours Delors,” as it opposed Jacques Delors’ ambitions for the EU.
- 4.
The project counted on the collaboration of the government of Gibraltar and the Gibraltar Garrison Library, in particular its Director, Jennifer Ballantine Perera, who was the Project Partner. Interviews were conducted by locally recruited researchers drawn from all sectors of the community and included researchers from the Moroccan community, the Jewish community, the Hindu community, as well as researchers from La Línea. These were trained by the Principal Investigator, Andrew Canessa, the Project Partner, Professor Paul Thompson (a renowned oral historian), and Professor Allison Moyer (an expert in bilingual interviewing). Almost 400 people were interviewed or surveyed on both sides of the Gibraltar/Spanish border. The interviews (317) were in-depth interviews, often lasting several hours, and conducted in English, Spanish or any combination of the two. In addition, some interviews were conducted in Moroccan Arabic. The interviews were representative of social class, ethnic and religious affiliation, gender, people with mobility issues, and people from the Spanish border town of La Línea and Gibraltar. There was a clear bias in the sample towards older people since they had the longer memories, but a representative sample of younger people was obtained. The youngest interviewee was 16 and the oldest was 101 at the time of interview. Non-restricted interviews (audio and transcripts) are archived with the UK Data Archive.
- 5.
But see also Haller’s (2000) ethnographic account which included ethnographic interviews in English and Spanish.
- 6.
This is in contrast to the recent Friends of Gibraltar Oral History Project (http://www.fogoh.org.uk/) which conducted interviews on Gibraltarians’ wartime experiences. There is a valuable resource, but all the interviews are in English, including with many people for whom English is not their mother tongue. It is worth noting that there is a general assumption that anything ‘official’ must be in English in Gibraltar, including interviews. On many occasions, we discovered that conversations that were fluently conducted in Spanish abruptly changed to English as soon as the recorder was set on ‘play’ and reverted to Spanish when it was turned off. If the interview was particularly long or recorded over more than one session, then people became considerably more relaxed and began to speak more Spanish. In certain circumstances, the same material was covered in both languages and we were able to observe differences in perspective between the two recordings.
- 7.
BoB interview April 17, 2016.
- 8.
BoB interview February 11, 2017.
- 9.
For a further discussion of mimesis in the colonial situation, see Bahbha (1994).
- 10.
There were many examples of people insisting they could not speak Spanish at all even when there was evidence to the contrary. The most clear and curious example of this was a woman in her late 80s who confessed not being able to speak the language despite the fact that her mother was a monolingual Spanish speaker with whom she lived until her mother’s death in 1990, that is, for 60 years.
- 11.
Literally, “It just doesn’t come out.”
- 12.
Bob Interview. Woman in her 80s: Los bisnietos son chiquitos. La mayorcita, bueno la mayorcita no me entiendo con ella. Esa que era una nieta y los padres no le enseñaron ni una papa de español y la otra habla lo poquito que aprendió cuando chica mientras los padres la llevaban a la escuela. En el momento que la niña ha ido a la escuela y la niña perdió el español.
- 13.
Unfortunately, the data on contemporary marriage patterns is unavailable but this is certainly borne out by our BoB data where people report either being married themselves to people from the UK or that their children are.
- 14.
It is significant that Caroline Norrie discovered that her interviewees were much more forthcoming when she confessed to a Scottish heritage. There were several occasions in our interviews when people expressed a closer affinity to non-English people from the UK and ascribed to them a less hierarchical nature than English people.
- 15.
Wage parity with the UK did not occur until July 1978.
- 16.
BoB interview 21 Feb 2015.
- 17.
BoB Interview 23 June 2014.
- 18.
La Atunara is a fishing village now absorbed into La Línea although it is a far older settlement.
- 19.
Here she points to the fact that the vast majority of Gibraltarians look very much as having Mediterranean origins even if their speech, clothing, and mannerisms are British.
- 20.
There was a considerable settlement of Genoese along the Spanish coast—not just in Gibraltar. The Picassos of Malaga are perhaps the most famous examples.
- 21.
Some examples are Ciappe to Chiappe, Cipolina to Chipolina, and Magnetto to Mañetto.
- 22.
The situation by 1868 was even worse for those in Gibraltar concerned about its Britishness. As Constantine reports, of a total population of 17,764 calculated by Police Magistrate F. Solly Flood, only 582 (3%) were ‘British’ (i.e. UK born). He does note the presence of 984 ‘natives of British origin,’ which we can surmise were descendants of someone with UK origins, but a large number of these had “become incorporated in the population of alien character” (in Constantine: 112). The twentieth-century distinction between UK British who settled for a short period and those who intermarried and ‘became’ Gibraltarian has its roots in this period. Well into the second half of the twentieth century, the children of, say, UK-born fathers married to Gibraltarian women would be predominantly Spanish speaking.
- 23.
It is actually stipulated in the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) which ceded Gibraltar to the British Crown that “Her Britannic Majesty, at the request of the Catholic King, does consent and agree, that no leave shall be given under any pretence whatsoever, either to Jews or Moors, to reside or have their dwellings in the said town of Gibraltar.” With the fleeing of almost the entire Spanish population of Gibraltar (see Oda, this volume) the demands of the garrison meant that this particular aspect of the Treaty was almost immediately broken. It is perhaps for this reason that Howes (1991) asserts Jews’ greater affinity with Britishness. See also Martínez et al., this volume.
- 24.
BoB interview March 30, 2016.
- 25.
The exceptions were those Gibraltarians born in the UK during the Second World War Evacuation. Other Gibraltarians did not get right of abode in the UK until the 1981 Immigration Act (enacted in 1983) which, following the Falklands War, gave full British citizenship to Falkland Islanders and Gibraltarians. Until then Gibraltarians travelled on UK passports with the line “Bearer has right of abode in the UK” crossed out and replaced (after joining the European Economic Community (EEC)) with a handwritten note “Bearer is a UK national for Community purposes.” This points to the irony of Gibraltarians having right of abode in Germany and France as citizens of the European community but not in the UK.
- 26.
I always got a sense of… pfffff back home. Acuérda que en aquél, que en aquellos años, España no era una nación… era una dictadura muy fuerte, era una nación que estaba empobrecida, it was years behind the rest of Europe, Ehmm… entonces… era distinto, ¿no? Era distinto, tú ibas para allá, eh… no sé, we were up a class at that time, I think. Eh… yo creo que influye todo, yo creo que influye, influye… Hombre, eso influye, ¿no? Lo que era la seguridad, el prestigio, etc., etc.
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Canessa, A. (2019). Introduction. In: Canessa, A. (eds) Bordering on Britishness. Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99310-2_1
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