Update+2

Just back this evening from a long weekend in Malaga, attending the First International Conference on Best Practices in Intercultural Education (Primer Congreso Internacional sobre Buenas Practicas en Educacion Intercultural), where I was heartened to find that the presenters consistently linked the ideas of immigration - interculturality - citizenship. This is precisely the conceptual chain that first struck me when I read about Education for Citizenship classes in the Spanish newspapers. The fact that the presenters put these concepts together helps me feel like I'm on the right track, even if I'm not exactly sure how to articulate what I am learning about the connections between these three phenomena/concepts at the ethnographic level. There was a *consistent* emphasis upon "citizenship" as a framework for understanding socio-cultural politics in Europe, however.

One presentation in particular still has me thinking, and I want to read the full version of the talk more carefully--it was one in which the presenter talked about poverty and the need to understand how poverty structures life trajectories, access to education, etc., etc. This was a light bulb moment for me: I need to understand the role of poverty at my fieldsite, because it has a *historic* role, not only associated with foreign immigration, but also with internal emigration. It may be what most defines the area, in fact.

I want to add that another theme that came up in the talks again and again was that of "mestizaje" (miscegination... sounds ugly in English), which as I understand it is the core of Spanish ideologies of ethno-cultural unity and a historically important notion for defining the solidarity of the Spanish nation-state. It seems to me that this idea is now being expanded and put to the purpose of incorporating new immigrants into the whole. The melting "puchero" (pot) just got bigger!