Ignacio Fradejas-García

University of Iceland | HI · School of Social Sciences

Romanian enclaves in Spain have received little academic attention so far, but are nevertheless of singular importance locally. In this study, we investigate two Romanian enclaves located in Castellón de la Plana and in Roquetas de Mar. In the first case, the enclave has emerged as a response to the demand of workers in the ceramic industry and construcion, and in the second case, in agriculture. We wish to contribute to the knowledge base about demographic enclaves by addressing two gaps in the literature. First, the functioning of ethnic enclaves has hardly been studied in tandem with the migration dynamics of the involved actors. Nevertheless, our prior research has shown that the phenomenon of the emergence of ethnic enclaves should be conceptualized taking into account the transnational social fields that fuel it and not only the internal dynamics in the enclave and the country of residence. We therefore study enclaves from a transnational perspective, which allows us to see how individuals in the two places coordinate their mobility patterns and care arrangements in order to benefit from the ethnic enclave. Second, prior research that measured transnational social fields quantitatively tended to focus exclusively on individuals as actors, ignoring organizational entities that may nevertheless greatly affect both migration patterns of individuals and the functioning of the enclave in labour market terms. To fill this gap, we combine an individual and an institutional perspective in a two-level social network model. We believe that this multilevel design is able to give a more complete understanding of ethnic enclaves. Our ultimate objective, then, is to investigate how circular migration patterns are intertwined with the emergence, maintenance and possible decay of enclaves, and how different individual positions in the transnational field are related to differences in outcomes such as labour market positions and the construction of the sense of community and identification. Specifically, our research questions are the following: 1. How can we conceptualize and measure the dimensions of transnational social fields? 2. How can we identify the possible existence of specialized roles in these structures and what are their functions? 3. What is the role that organizational entities play in transnational social structures? 4. What is the relation between these transnational structures and the emergence, maintenance and possible decay of enclaves? 5. What effects do individual positions in these structures have on the insertion at the labour market, sense of belonging with Spain, Rumania and Europe, and in general, with the social integration of Romanian immigrants? We propose intensive, multisited fieldwork in the two enclaves in Spain and the community of origin in Romania (in the region of Dâmbovița), combining ethnography and multilevel social network analysis. We will use recently developed, innovative methods of data collection and data analysis to reach our goals.