Do you know there are beautiful women? : migration, sexuality and male fantasies in Francisco Carcaño’s depictions of Melilla (1900-1930)

Abstract

This contribution focuses on migration and sexuality in the Spanish exclave of Melilla in the first decades of the 20th century through the works of Francisco Carcaño, a military officer and resident of the city. Melilla, a city that only took shape at the end of the 19th century, is now a relevant place for current debates about migration in the Mediterranean as it constitutes, together with Ceuta, the only land border between the European Union and an African country. For centuries an isolated border fortress with a stagnant population of soldiers and prisoners, Melilla grew in a dramatic and unprecedented way between 1875 and 1914, increasing its population twenty-five fold – from around 1,500 inhabitants in 1877 to more than 40,000 in 1911. By the outbreak of the World War I, Melilla was both “Spain’s most ethnically diverse community” and the main bridgehead for Spanish colonial expansion in northern Morocco. It was also, arguably, one of the cities in Spain in which men and women could explore their sexuality more openly. In this chapter I explore this hypothesis, which is relatively difficult to prove given the scarcity of written sources, through the literary works of Francisco Carcaño. Even though his perspective as a Spanish, male, middle-class officer is limited and biased, there are passages in his texts that illustrate aspects that are absent in other written sources like press articles or bureaucratic documents.