Parallel Lives or Overlapping Worlds? Explaining the development of the social lives and interactions of Mediterranean migrants in the Rotterdam port region, 1960 – 1980.

The integration of Mediterranean migrants in Dutch society has received significant scholarly attention, but it has rarely been approached from a bottom-up perspective. This is especially true for migrants in Rotterdam. In this thesis I have partly filled this gap by applying a qualitative analysis to primary sources that reflect migrants’ own experiences. My aim has been to analyse migrants’ social lives to see to what extend their lives overlapped with Dutch society and how (and why) this changed during their stay (and in some cases settlement). I have done so by focusing specifically on Mediterranean migrants that worked in the Rotterdam port, mainly because the port industries were one of the biggest employers. An implicit question that my thesis poses is whether this bottom-up perspective leads to different conclusions than those drawn in earlier historical works on Mediterranean migrants’ integration. The short answer to this is: not necessarily. The general conclusions that I make are the same as those presented in earlier works. Namely, the social lives of migrants became more ‘parallel’ to Dutch people from the 1970s onward. Consistently high recruitment numbers followed by an economic crisis – which hit port industries especially hard – made migrants’ stay more difficult. Their social lives in part turned inward as a protective measure to rising discrimination, but also because this was promoted by failing Dutch policy aimed at helping migrants integrate. However, the bottom-up approach has allowed for more nuance: it shows that there are cases of continuity between the 1960s (the period of early settlement) and the 1970s. The resulting image of migrants’ social lives is more diverse, shows that migrants were not unwilling to integrate and that their lives were never fully ‘parallel’.