12th FENIX CONGRESS: PUBLICATIONS

The 12th Fenix Congress (2025) critically examines traditional migration models that have asymmetrically privileged political motivations (deemed more legitimate and worthy) over economic ones (considered less legitimate and associated with lower social status). Adopting an approach that integrates sociology, history, literature, gender studies, migration studies, and cultural anthropology, this Fenix Congress explores the complexity of female mobility experiences, where the political and economic dimensions constantly intersect.

The 19th Fenix Dossier, under the title Current Representations of Economic Emigration Undertaken by Spanish Women in the 20th Century, analyzes contemporary representations of Spanish women’s economic migration from the late 19th century to the present, addressing diverse host contexts (including, in the Americas, the United States, Argentina, and Brazil, and in Europe, Germany, Switzerland, France, the United Kingdom, and Belgium) while exploring the intersections between economic and political factors from an interdisciplinary perspective.

The dossier is structured around three fundamental concepts. First, the integration of moral and material dignity proposed by Martha C. Nussbaum through the capabilities approach, which challenges the historical primacy of “first-generation rights” (religious and political freedom) over “second-generation rights” (economic and social). Second, the concept of “responsibility” as articulated by Manuel Cruz, understood not as culpability but as an intersubjective communal commitment that entails responding to the call of the other, etymologically linking response and responsibility through Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy. Third, “memory” as an experience that reveals violence legitimized through forgetting, following Sánchez Cuervo’s propositions regarding the new epistemological paradigm that vindicates the transcendence of personal memory against the disciplinary prejudices of official History.

The dossier employs a methodology that combines literary, cinematographic, sociological, and historical analysis to explore how the subordinate position of Spanish economic migrants is dignified. Drawing on Judith Butler’s theories of coalitions born from vulnerability, it examines the creative mechanisms that shape Spanish migrants’ responsibilities. It analyzes the construction of an alternative and diverse representation of the Spanish economic and female migrant—a subject that challenges the exclusionary binaries of the official historical paradigm: economic/political, emigration/exile, power/subordination, unity/plurality.

The dossier seeks to address fundamental questions concerning the responsibility of Spanish women who migrate for economic reasons: What defines their responsibilities when they emigrate? What are their connections to political displacement? How do dignity, responsibility, and memory interact in this context? What is the scope of contemporary reconstructions of the 21st-century Spanish economic female migrant?

The proposal remains highly relevant today, as evidenced by the documentary Españoles en el exilio (2017) by Rubén Hornillo and the autobiography Flores en la basura (2022) by Violeta Serrano. Both works investigate the political-economic motivations and the imperatives of dignity and responsibility that have compelled Spain’s “Lost Generation” to leave their country since 2009. This phenomenon represents the most recent manifestation of a historical continuum originating in the 19th century, demonstrating that an intersectional interpretation offers an optimal approach to the Spanish migratory phenomenon.

The dossier ultimately aspires to reconstruct interdisciplinarily the multifaceted identity of the Spanish economic migrant from a deferred temporality that projects the 21st-century perspective onto past female mobility experiences. This interdisciplinary approach is complemented by a transnational perspective spanning from the Americas to Europe, revealing the geographical breadth of a phenomenon that transcends both disciplinary and national borders. The analysis is further characterized by its interrogation of boundaries between political motives, economic imperatives, social responsibilities, and the pursuit of human dignity. Thus, this monograph aims to demonstrate the varied ways in which these motivations continuously intermingle, evidencing a fluid continuum between different types of migration that exceeds traditional categorical frameworks.

The 19th Fenix Special Issue, Current Representations of Economic Emigration Undertaken by Spanish Women in the 20th Century, is accepted by the journal Iberoamericana (Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut) for publication in 2026 (Year XXV, N° 92).