‘You’re such an island person’ How marine conservation helped me find my Majorcan identity anew

In 2011, I was 24 years old and had recently graduated from university in Barcelona. With the 2008 economic crisis still lingering, I moved back home to Majorca and was dealing with unemployment. During that time, I met a tourist with whom I became romantically involved. As we were getting to know each other, they said something that became a persistent memory for me. They said: “You’re such an island person.”

In that specific moment, I understood it as a metaphor: you are isolated, you are by yourself, you are difficult to access. My identity was so far from that of an islander that I found myself doing mental gymnastics to interpret what they thought of me. Once it became clear that we did not share an image about what an “island person” is, they started clarifying: you are relaxed, easy-going, you go with the flow. Now I recognise a figure that is often associated with islands in popular culture.

But for many Majorcans, the island is far from a relaxing place, especially in the summer. As summer approaches, roads, public transport and coastal areas become progressively more crowded and approach a state of quasi-collapse. This manifests in impossible queues everywhere, an increase in traffic accidents and regular droughts. It peaks around July and August, then from September onwards there is a slow decongestion. Rinse and repeat every summer. This routine is the result of a series of tourism booms that have led the tourism industry to overtake traditional economic sectors.

The first of those booms took place in the 1960s, when Majorca became one of the most popular tourist destinations in Europe. A significant mass of workers were mobilised to support the industry as it developed. As they migrated from the mainland to the island, they created a new working class, uprooted from their native regions and attracted by what were, at the time, better salaries and working conditions.

Revising my identity

The social, historic and economic influence of tourism has conditioned the life of any resident of the island, and I certainly see my island identity as something shaped by the socioeconomic conditions in which I grew up.

I was the second child of two of those migrant workers. They cleaned and waited tables in hotels, which helped us live comfortably. Luxuries were rare, however. I was born in Majorca but for many I was a foraster (an outsider), the (mostly) derogatory word used by Majorcans to describe someone who does not have Majorcan roots. Furthermore, I spoke Catalan neither natively, nor with a Majorcan accent. Issues of class, ethnicity and native language are far more complex than these three sentences imply, but I think they are suggestive of key elements that marked my upbringing.

Why didn’t an islander identity develop in me? Understanding the socioeconomic characteristics of my childhood and adolescence has helped me to reinterpret this question. I started thinking about how my social positioning conditioned my knowledge of and attachment to the island’s environment and to the Majorcan territori – a central notion in the Majorcan understanding of the environment – as something that is part of me, especially in my relationship with the sea.

No time for the sea

Because of my family, I have always been aware of what it means to work in tourism services. You work while others holiday, and you holiday (or rather, are forced into temporary unemployment) while most people work. As soon as I turned 16, I started working in the summer to pay for my studies during the winter. This meant I had little time, resources or energy to go to the beach, never mind other marine activities.

So I never interacted much with the coastal areas of Majorca – at least, not recreationally and not beyond the occasional day trip to the beach. Instead, I developed a strong sense that water activities such as sailing and diving, and accessing remote, non-overcrowded areas, were the preserve of tourists and wealthier people. As I came to learn, this perception was aligned with how the sea becomes a way to establish socioeconomic status for the rich.

Becoming Majorcan with the sea

During the past decade, awareness about marine conservation has grown in Majorca, with the emergence of regulations and civil society activists. Some of them are specific and protect a single species: for example, the Posidonia Decree protects the seagrass Posidonia oceanica, which is now a symbol for marine conservation.

These advances have allowed me to come back to the island for the longest period I have spent there (three months of ethnographic fieldwork) since I left in 2012 to do my PhD in Finland. I’m currently analysing the scientific, social and political processes that have made this growing interest in marine conservation possible, especially notions of care and ethics in knowledge production.

I’ve been able to revisit the island and many spaces I already knew from a position of wonder, capitalising on the knowledge acquired during my investigations, on the experiences of having lived abroad for more than 10 years and on the reworking of my intersectional insecurities.

Becoming a migrant (as my parents once were) and then a citizen of Finland was key. Finland, with its numerous islands on the Baltic and its many lakes and swamps, is a country with a deep relationship with water. There, sailing is not as class-based an activity as it is in Majorca, where boats and moorings are prohibitive for most. This helped me reinterpret water as a space that is not reserved for the rich and wealthy.

Becoming a Finnish citizen made me reflect on my confidence as a naturalised Finn in contrast with my uprooting as a foraster. The challenge of learning the Finnish language drew my attention towards my insecurity expressing myself in Catalan, despite having known the language since I was a child. Public debates in Majorca take place in Catalan, and being unconfident had made me doubt my right to participate meaningfully. I slowly started reclaiming Catalan as my language, and my Majorcan identity as a native.

These changes, and my growing knowledge of marine conservation, have helped me start to see the sea and the coast as part of my identity, as spaces I can know and care for as if they belonged to me. My belonging and attachment to the sea come not from notions of ancestry and indigeneity, but from performative practices of wonder and care. My interactions with marine scientists, activists and regulators, and my field visits to beaches, dunes and inlets, helped me to develop a relationship with the sea that was once elusive. A relationship that is finally on the mend.

A new type of island person

This is not a statement about who can know Majorcan seas. Many working class migrants and non-natives develop intimate relationships with the sea. Some have become my teacher-informants during fieldwork, helping me develop that relationship with the sea myself, something for which I am incredibly grateful. Instead, it’s a reflection on how the intersection of class, ethnic and linguistic identity can act as a limitation that shapes how we care for the environment. This poses intersectional questions to a very specific scape of migration, that of Majorca, where first generation migrants are reshaping what being Majorcan and caring for the island is.

Writing this piece has also helped me understand what an “island person” is. This is far from the idea of a relaxed, easy-going person who goes with the flow. Being an island person means being aware of how my existence is mediated by my relationship with the affordances and limitations of the unique features that characterise Majorca: an ecosystem where land, sea, people and environment depend on each other. Being an island person requires me to know the island and feel it as mine. Only then can I know what is at stake if we push it against its ecological limits.