In & Out of Morocco. Smuggling and Migration in a Frontier Boomtown (review)

Book Reviews maternal. The painter Marguerite Gerard, whose work "Maternité" appears on the book's cover, portrayed motherhood with a understated sensuality, reminiscent of Vigee-Lebrun's portraits of mothers and children. These shortcomings notwithstanding, Algazi's book capably begins the work of mapping a new terrain wherein an overlooked form of subjectivity is given its due. Lesley H. Walker Indiana University, South Bend David A. McMurray. In & Out of Morocco. Smuggling and Migration in a Frontier Boomtown. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001. Pp. 203. $17.95 (paper). In his study McMurray sets out to examine how the society and culture of the small Rifi border town of Nador in northeast Morocco has been affected by the twin economic activities of smuggling and migration. His study juxtaposes personal narrative ("lived experience"), on the one hand, which recounts conversations and anecdotal material coming from his personal exchanges with Rifi acquaintances with, on the other, analyses of sociological and cultural factors impacting on the recent history of Nador. In general, the author examines how the exterior influences of smuggling and migration have been "interiorized" by the Nadori people, how they have influenced their motivation and formed their ways of thinking and speaking about the world, how they have contributed to the mass influx of population from rural areas into the city, and how they have changed the basis of social status (chap. 4) and entered into popular culture (chap. 5). Materially, the impact of smuggling and migration, particularly in the decade of the 1980s, "[has] contributed to a kind of rampant consumerism that spread at the expense of other ways of being [and has] extended the effects of a globalized culture on Nadori society [...]"( 133). Among the phenomena that McMurray treats is that of the transformation of traditional culture by smuggling and migration and how social standing has become associated almost exclusively with purchasing power through the importation of consumer goods by returning migrants and through the smuggling of foreign-made consumer products. In speaking of the importation of culture through globalization, the author concludes that "the leveling power of American mass cultural production—the way it marginalizes other cultures and languages, the way it harnesses local markets—cannot be overestimated" (137). The lowered prestige of local products through the import or smuggling of foreign commodities has resulted in a diminution of self-subsistence, while the rising migrancy has resulted in Maghreb cultures such as that of Morocco becoming producers of labor power for Western countries. "Migrants and smugglers in Nador have accelerated the process by opening up commodity circuits and integrating the country into the free market as thoroughly as Intemational Monetary Fund pronouncements ever could, thanks to the sheer variety of goods made available via smuggling and the way foreign migrants have boosted the prestige accorded to those who own foreign items" (138). The deleterious effect of this "plunge" into the global economy, McMurray feels, lies in the devaluing and obliteration of the local by the hyper-importation of foreign consumer products and the ubiquitousness of foreign images in the mass media. McMurray concludes his study by commenting on the changes that have taken place since the 1980s: the growth of drug traffic in the region of Nador, the emergence of Spain as a Moroccan migrant destination, and the new generation of migrants looking to begin a fresh life abroad rather than returning home with wealth earned from their labor. McMurray sets out to register the impact of smuggling and massive labor migration on everyday life in the small Moroccan border town of Nador. He has succeeded in writing a very readable as well as a highly informative book that contributes importantly to our understanding of the economic forces impinging on modern day Morocco. John Erickson University of Kentucky Vol. XLlI, No. 1 143 ...