Convivencia, crossing borders and boundaries Muslim-Christian couples in Ceuta

Based on 14 months of anthropological fieldwork, this dissertation focuses on the courtship and marriage narratives of interreligious couples residing in Ceuta, the Spanish enclave on the Moroccan coast. Often portrayed as a zone of intense confrontation, where Sub-Saharan Africans meet the fatal end of their migratory projects, Ceuta is also a site of quotidian coexistence between its Christian, Muslim, Hindu and Jewish residents. In Ceuta, the officially promoted discourse of ‘convivencia’ serves both as a medium for the political management of diversity and as a template for imagining the enclave’s idealized future. Within this discourse, interreligious couples are celebrated as the ultimate symbols of Ceuta’s multicultural success. However, as interreligious couples also transgress politically charged identity boundaries, their unions are problematized by the ethno-religious communities to which they belong. This study investigates: (i) how these couples emerge from and connect with their respective religious communities, (ii) how ideas of ethno-religious belonging and convivencia play a role in determining which marriage and partner choices are considered desirable, (iii) how and by whom these interreligious couples are problematized, and (iv) how attitudes towards particular mixed marriages and their offspring are shaped by entanglements of religion, gender, nationality, and class in this border setting. By studying how interreligious couples navigate these complex dynamics, this dissertation explores a site where global processes affect intimate relationships. In so doing, it not only contributes to the growing literature on convivencia, but also to scholarship on mixed intimacies, political borders, migration, religious identification and racialization of religion.