In recent years, migration has become one of the defining features and preoccupations of European
societies and a prominent literary theme. During the 1970s and 1980s, Spain experienced a wave of
Moroccan migration that peaked at the beginning of the 1990s. Representations of Moroccan
immigrants in Spanish media and literature have tended to be negative, shaped by a long history of
tension between the two countries going back to al-Andalus, the Spanish-Moroccan War and the
Spanish protectorate in Morocco. Recent years, however, have seen the emergence of a group of
Moroccan immigrant writers who offer a more nuanced portrait of the figure of the immigrant and of the
experience of migration. Most of these writers belong to what sociologists call generation 1.5, the
generation that experienced the migration process as children accompanying their parents. This
project examines how these authors represent generation 1.5 in their works and more specifically how
they negotiate their multilingual environment, how they appropriate genres and oral traditions of both
countries and how they depict the intergenerational dynamics of migration as well as its impact on
subject formation. This interdisciplinary research, moreover, seeks to probe the relevance of the
sociological concept of generation 1.5 to the field of literary studies.