Author Shifts Conversations on Migration to the "Left-Behinds"

What does migration look like beyond Europe’s borders, asks anthropologist Alice Elliot in this sensitive study based on her fieldwork in Morocco. The author spent a year living with other young women in the Tadla region, at the foot of the Atlas Mountains in central Morocco. So many people have migrated between here and L-brra, “The Outside” (as her companions refer to Europe) that many cars have Italian and Spanish license plates, neon signs light up the Bar Italia and Café Paris, and Elliot wakes to cries of “Bologna, Bologna” (her own hometown) from a second-hand clothes vendor advertising the Italian origin of his goods. Migration is not a one-way street. Men who have settled abroad send remittances home and return each summer to reunite with left-behind wives and children. Women adapt to their absence, which makes their own status ambivalent, for better or worse: They may enjoy their independence, but loneliness and uncertainty pervade. The laws and customs of The Outside govern the rhythms, dreams and sorrows of their private lives. As Elliot shows, migration has complex motivations and effects, beyond the economic—and above all, on those left in its wake.