Social Position and Place-Protective Action in a New Immigration Context: Understanding Anti-Mosque Campaigns in Catalonia

Abstract

This article examines the structural conditions and cultural narratives underlying the high frequency and intensity of anti-mosque campaigns in the Spanish region of Catalonia. Drawing on Blumer's theory of prejudice as a sense of group position, as it has been elaborated and extended to multi-ethnic settings by subsequent scholarship, I contend that local reactions to mosques in Catalonia have been shaped by context-specific configurations of identity and urban space. I show how longstanding socio-economic and cultural divisions within Catalonia's native population, as well as the inscription of these divisions within the spatial ordering of the region, have heightened feelings of threat elicited by the large-scale arrival of Muslim immigrants to working-class neighborhoods in recent years. In advancing this argument, I build on the insights of geographers and urban sociologists to develop a spatially sensitive understanding of social position and perceived group threat that considers the importance of place identities and the interaction between distinct registers of territorial belonging.