As with any story, this one has many paths that were taken and not taken, along with backgrounds that contour the variety of possible paths, leading up to the present day. This chapter presents several of the pathways important for understanding how, when I arrived on that ferry, I found the mass of Moroccan-origin passengers who were born and raised in Europe, traveling ‘home’ for their summer holidays.

The first layer in this background relates the postwar labor migration history between Morocco and the three European nations under discussion (France, Belgium and The Netherlands). This layer accounts for the presence of Moroccans with similar, comparable migration histories in these countries. Their migration histories created material and social pathways for the annual summer holiday visit to Morocco – now, along with certain other diasporic populations in Europe (Turkish in Germany or Portuguese in France, for example), practically an institutionalized annual exodus.

This annual summer visit sets the stage for the next layer of background: multilingual practices in Morocco. Migration-based multilingual configurations are enabled by intersections of codes that are official, national and regional; written and spoken; local or foreign; and practiced in the home or outside the home by post-migrant Moroccans. All of these configurations are possible in the diasporic population, and can become relevant to practices of diasporic visitors from Europe in interaction with others in public spaces in Morocco.

The last sociolinguistic layer contextualizes how the skills involved in bargaining – an everyday activity in Morocco – are also performative utterances that change the state of the world after the speech act has been accomplished. For diasporic visitors, demonstrating bargaining skill has potential material consequences for successful or unsuccessful interactions when they try to purchase goods. These material consequences reflect on how categories of belonging in bargaining become relevant to complex global discourses of value and economic power, which feed back into the first background of migration histories between Morocco and Europe and their contemporary economic impacts in Morocco.