The social skin of mistrust: harraga , hogra , and the politics of (im)mobility in the struggle for youth citizenship

This article theorizes the relationship between institutional mistrust and (im)mobility through the lived experiences of young Moroccan migrants, known as harraga. Drawing on a multi-sited and multimodal ethnography conducted between 2020 and 2022, I argue that harraga constitute a transnational mobile group whose cohesion is articulated through a shared history of humiliation (hogra) and a radical mistrust of border control and child governance mechanisms. By following their migratory itineraries across the Maghreb-Europe borderlands, the paper explores how the legal classification of Unaccompanied Foreign Minor (translated from the Spanish legal category MENA, abbreviated here as UAM) functions as an infrastructure of control that the harraga navigate through the performance of hrig (the performance of burning borders). The article identifies a crucial paradox of mobility justice: while individual trust in institutions is often seen as disaffiliation from the group, collective mistrust has crystallized into organized political practices that demand state justice. Ultimately, I conclude that for these ‘intruder’ subjects, mistrust is not a failure of integration—a category increasingly deployed within European policy regimes as an extension of border enforcement—but a form of mobile agency and a struggle for an insurgent youth citizenship in the face of European bordering practices.