Introduction

This introductory chapter contextualizes how migrations have created Moroccan diasporic populations in Europe, and concomitantly the practice of annual summer visits to Morocco. Magharba min el-kharij – ‘Moroccans from outside’ – are persons born in Europe to two Moroccan parents, and who now visit Morocco as adults. But how does the act of travel and the time spent visiting shape ‘belonging’ for these diasporic populations? How do they learn how to ‘belong’ when they visit regularly or irregularly, and how does the place they visit – their ancestral homeland and its residents – respond to them? What do they actually do while on holiday there? Wagner introduces these questions as a frame for ethnographic investigation of how this annual holiday and the leisure and cyclical mobility practices it involves hold significance for what it means, in practical terms, to be actively between places – to be ‘from’ somewhere, but simultaneously not.