How do we live with “Them”? An investigation into the new arrivals in La Jonquera in the shadow of the “ciudad del pecado”

Abstract

This article examines the condition of “the new comers” in a border area saturated by the parallel economy and cross-border sex work: La Jonquera, a Spanish town in the Alt Empordà region, located on the Perpignan-Barcelona axis. It explores how recently settled foreign populations negotiate their place within a social space structured by the massive presence of brothels (puticlubs) and a reputation as a “ciudad del pecado” (city of sin) which precedes and conditions any gaze cast upon them. The central research question is the following: how, in a border territory saturated by the parallel economy, do new arrivals negotiate their position between a local population that offers them only conditional recognition, and sex workers whose stigmatizing proximity threatens their quest for respectability? The study is based on a qualitative methodology conducted between 2024 and 2026. The corpus consists of twenty-three open-ended interviews, supplemented by fifteen informal discussions, carried out with residents of La Jonquera. A preliminary phase of familiarization with the field made it possible to contextualize the data and establish a network of local stakeholders. The analysis focuses on two heuristic subsets: the local population, heirs to a local memory, and the new arrivals, mostly of foreign origin, whose recent settlement exposes them to a specific form of scrutiny in a town already marked by the cross-border sex economy. The findings reveal intertwined dynamics. New comers suffer from an amalgam that associates them with actors in the parallel economy, through a metonymic slippage that reflects a persisting coloniality of power on border margins. Faced with this stigma, they develop strategies for acquiring a “capital of autochthony” – educational investment, local shops, learning Catalan, local socializing – but encounter an identity glass ceiling: long-standing residence remains out of reach for those who are not “de toda la vida” (from forever). Finally, the need to distinguish themselves from sex workers, who occupy the bottom of the local hierarchy, imposes a permanent labor of respectability (practices of spatial and bodily distinction), which is never definitively secured because the specter of amalgamation always threatens to resurface. Together, these dynamics define what we propose to call a “third position”: an in-between state irreducible both to the category of locals and to that of sex workers, characterized by a permanent identity fatigue. Nevertheless, in the interstices of this discomfort, unexpected proximities and silent reconfigurations of belonging begin to take shape, revealing the agency of the actors. La Jonquera, thus emerges not as a local anomaly, but as a privileged observatory of the identity tensions and exclusionary mechanisms at work in contemporary European societies.

Key words: Mediterranean, in-between, otherness, migration.