1It is June 2012, and I am attending an event to celebrate thirty years of the mission locale [1] in Montville, a town in the working-class suburbs of Paris. I have been invited as a sociologist who has studied professional development among young working-class people and is assumed to know (a little) about community youth centers, their role, and history. [2] As I leave the hall, three young women—three sisters, in fact—are waiting to speak to me. It is the eldest who begins the conversation. She “congratulates” me on my talk, during which I reminded those present [3] of the long-established (and therefore entirely normal) presence of north African families in France [4] and insisted on differentiating within this social group, whose recently emerged (and often invisible) “middle class” now coexists with the continued existence of socially disaffiliated young people who are conversely highly visible in the public space—Elias’s “minority of the worst”—and from whom most of the group are looking to set themselves apart. [5] The talk was also an opportunity for me to consider the debate about the specificity of the sociological perspective, to contest the idea of “sociological excuses” in vogue among a certain strand of the left, to examine more closely the social conditions for the poorer achievement of boys “in the quartiers” (neighborhoods) and the socially deviant attitudes that some adopt. I would later learn that my words had struck a chord with Samira, the eldest sister, because she recognized in them the characteristic features of her siblings’ lives. [6]

2This meeting sparked an (ongoing) investigation that I aim to present in this article. Although its findings are piecemeal, this case study has the merit of presenting a detailed picture of the paths taken over the last forty years by eight siblings from an Algerian family, all experiencing upward social mobility. The upward intergenerational mobility of north African families in France over the period 1970–2010 is confirmed by the (few) quantitative studies on the topic, but is still little acknowledged in the public sphere. The “anecdotalization” of society (Gérard Noiriel’s “fait-diversification”) and exaggerated news reporting around French individuals of north African descent (such as Khaled Kelkal in 1995, Zacarias Moussaoui in 2001, and Mohamed Merah in 2012) have significantly contributed to disguising this very important, but no doubt less newsworthy phenomenon. This ethnographic study does not of course claim general significance, but I believe it does enable better understanding, via gendered pathways that are contextualized in time within a single sibling group, of certain aspects of social mobility—both intra- and intergenerational—rarely revealed by statistical studies of social mobility. The detailed follow-up of the educational, professional, marital, residential, and other paths taken by members of the same sibling group (with sixteen years separating the eldest from the youngest) also invites us to break with a particular meritocratic Republican political discourse that often exists around the supposed gradual integration of immigrants through social mobility via the school system. The differences in educational success and social status within this sibling group—primarily to the detriment of the boys—are undeniably linked to the decline in living conditions for the working classes, and the way in which their means of social and political support in the cités (projects) have weakened over the last fifteen to twenty years. As such, they enable us to raise the question of the social and historical conditions that make social mobility possible—i.e., the factors that facilitate or obstruct the kind of mythified pathway embodied here by the eldest sisters.

The Belhoumi family, or the last wave of Algerian immigration in France during the post-war Trente Glorieuses [7]

3The Belhoumi family is fairly typical of the third age of Algerian immigration to France, which took place after the war of independence (1962), when the sons of Algerian peasants (fellahs) who were unable to find stable employment in Algeria or were drawn to the dream of emigrating (Elghorba) to the former motherland, left their country of origin, newly liberated from the colonial yoke, in order to sell their labor power to the companies of French industry. [8]

4The father of the Belhoumi family was born in 1942 and grew up in a family of very poor small-scale farmers in a remote village in the Mascara province in western Algeria. He attended elementary school intermittently, when he was not needed to help with farm work or his family’s day to day struggle for economic survival. [9] He went to France for the first time in 1961, for his military service in Strasbourg, and was called home a few months later when Algeria became an independent country. He enlisted in the Algerian army for four years, then worked a series of odd jobs in Mostaganem province. These jobs did not lead to anything more permanent, and as the flow of emigration to France began to pick up pace again in the late 1960s, he gradually formed a plan to go and work in the former motherland. After his marriage (1969) and the birth of his first child (1970), he managed to get a working visa for France. He then went to work in Lyon (where he had a cousin, also originally from Mascara), and remained there for around two years before moving to Poitiers, where his sister-in-law (his wife’s sister) was based. He earned a living from odd jobs in the construction industry, struggled to find housing, and made many return trips between Mostaganem and Poitiers. It was a hard life, in short, living from hand to mouth in lonely migrant worker hostels, an “immigrant’s life” that he has rarely discussed with his own children. For six or seven years he went back and forth between France and Algeria, making efforts to return each summer, during the paid holiday period, to see his family back in Algeria (which had gradually grown, with the birth of two other children: Leïla in 1973, and Rachid in 1975).

5Mrs. Belhoumi, who is ten years younger than her husband, was born in 1952 and grew up in Mostaganem, where she was able to continue her studies up to collège (middle school) before leaving education at the end of the quatrième (eighth grade). As she was partly the product of the French school system (lessons were not taught in Arabic in Algeria until 1969), she has a good understanding of French, speaking it very properly, and not without a certain pride. During a long interview that I held with her in June 2013, a year after I began the study, she revealed—for the first time, with her eldest son looking on, somewhat stunned—that she had been “adopted” at the age of four by a neighbor of her parents who “worked with the colonists” and had already had two children, “with no man of the house.” [10] Mrs. Belhoumi was raised as an only child by this woman (who for a long time she considered to be her “real” mother), and was therefore able to get a good education, and continue her studies up to collège, which was far from the norm for women of her generation in 1960s Algeria. Her life changed, and her fate took an abrupt turn, with the sudden death of her “adoptive” mother when she was fourteen. She had to immediately move back in with her parents, whom she barely knew and with whom she had never had a real emotional relationship, and was made to leave school by her father in order to take up paid work while waiting to get married.

6She married Mr. Belhoumi at the age of seventeen, still feeling a strong inner sense of injustice and bitterness that would later lead her not to accept “just anything,” and to improve her position in their marriage as she grew older. During the early years of their married life, as the first few children were born, she dedicated herself in Algeria to her role as housewife and mother. However, she could not stand being separated from her husband and always waiting for him to return, and it was not long before she asked him to “take them to France.” During our interview, she explained that she could see he was getting used to the situation and was not entirely unhappy with it, as the distance also had its advantages (such as independence for eleven out of twelve months, and no need to account for his spending to anyone). He remained deaf to her pleas, with the excuse that it was difficult to find housing in France, and she remembered having “fought” with him for many years, each summer, to persuade him to agree. It was with the birth of their third child (Rachid) that she ratcheted up the pressure on her husband, even threatening him with divorce—and thus a bad reputation—until he eventually caved. He agreed to bring the whole family to France under its family reunification policy, and went in search of HLM accommodation. [11] He found them a three-bed apartment and the family moved to France in late summer 1977, settling in a suburb of a large city in central France, where there was already a small colony from Mostaganem.

Table 1

Comparing the social outcomes for the eight brothers and sisters in the sibling group [12], [13], [14], [15], [16], [17], [18], [19], [20]

Samira Leïla Rachid Azzedine Mounir Dalila Amel Nadia Year of birth 1970 (Algeria) 1973 (Algeria) 1975 (Algeria) 1979 (France) 1981 (France) 1983 (France) 1984 (France) 1986 (France) Qualifications Bac ES12 (1989), nursing diploma (1992), two-year master’s in training development (2012) Bac ES (1992), DUT13 in social service careers, master’s in education sciences (1997), two-year master’s in professional development (2004) Left school at the end of the cinquième (seventh grade) BEP14 in industry Bac pro15 Bac STT16 (2002), nursing diploma (2010) Bac STT (2003), university diploma in humanities (2006), diploma in social work (2010) Bac L17 (2005), university diploma in sociology, vocational degree in human resources (2008) Career Nurse (1992–2000), Head nurse (2001–2012) Youth information bureau (1997), mission locale (manager since 2008) Odd jobs, sales assistant (business), sales manager since 2010, juvenile protection service training lead Bus driver (RATP18) since 2006 Temp (manual worker), sales assistant, sales representative, made redundant in May 2013 Care assistant (2004–08), nurse since 2010 Social worker, children’s social worker (Seine-Saint-Denis) since Sept. 2010 National Employment Agency advisor since 2010 Marital status First marriage (1992), Second marriage (2004), husband of Algerian origin, commercial manager. Two daughters (2006 and 2008) Religious marriage (2012), husband of Algerian origin, CGT19 trade union activist and manual worker. First child (Yassine, 2013) Lives with a “French woman” who is a service/sales employee Five children from three previous relationships Single with periods of cohabitation (2012–13) in Paris Married, “French” wife, daughter of a manual worker (EDF20 and CGT) One child Marriage (2011), husband of Algerian origin, National Employment Agency advisor. First child (2012) Single Religious marriage (2012), husband of Algerian origin, private investigator. First child (2013) Place of residence Rents a three-bedroom apartment in Paris, 18th arrondissement Two-bedroom apartment in the inner Paris suburbs Rents a house, 3 km from his parents Studio in the northern suburbs of Paris, 18th arrondissement Rents an apartment, neighborhood near his parents Private apartment, Montpellier Studio in Paris, 15th arrondissement Studio in Paris, 18th arrondissement

Comparing the social outcomes for the eight brothers and sisters in the sibling group [12], [13], [14], [15], [16], [17], [18], [19], [20]

7The Belhoumi family moved into a bigger apartment and continued to grow after their move, with five children arriving at regular intervals (two brothers in 1979 and 1981, and the final three sisters in 1983, 1984, and 1986). The siblings were also divided: between the three eldest, born in Algeria (they had Algerian nationality and had to apply for “reinstatement of French nationality” when they came of age—the two eldest sisters, Samira and Leïla, took this step, but the boy, Rachid, still remains faithful to his Algerian passport) and the five youngest, born in France and automatically French citizens. [21] The new arrivals in France significantly affected family life: they had to squeeze into the bedrooms and cope with the multiple material constraints weighing on a large family. This was to the objective detriment of the two eldest girls who, whether they liked it or not, from around the age of ten or twelve had to take on the role of second mothers, combining their schoolwork with many household chores.

8Samira, the eldest daughter, had internalized this role to such an extent that she did not discuss it of her own accord during our first two interviews, but when I returned to the issue, revealed the extent to which her mother’s many pregnancies in France had affected and hurt her. When she was sixteen, in her peak teenage years, her mother’s announcement of a new (eighth) pregnancy provoked a sudden heartfelt outburst from Samira: “So I suddenly just said: Have an abortion! I can’t cope anymore! I can’t cope! It’s awful, when I look back, to say that to your own mother…” It was not without remorse that she had such a vivid memory of this scene—and also of her own nerve, which can be understood given the extent to which the burden of her parents’ inability to control their fertility ultimately and very concretely “landed” on her, at a time when she hoped to be a little less involved at home and free from supporting her little brothers’ and sisters’ upbringing. It is no coincidence that the two eldest sisters put off their own first pregnancies for as long as possible (Samira had her first child at the age of thirty-six, and Leïla at the age of forty), as they wanted to have some space and make the most of their own youth after living for part of their teenage years “among the diapers” (to use one of their own expressions) and feeling from a very early age as if in a way they had already been “mothers.”

Educational success for the girls, relative failure for the boys

9The difference between the male and female siblings is fundamental, and first becomes apparent when looking at their different educational pathways. The five girls all obtained the baccalaureate, or “bac” (bac ES for the two eldest and the youngest, bac STT for the third and fourth), then completed various three-year university courses (nursing diploma, degree in education sciences, vocational degree), taking the classic upward routes for working-class children as they went into higher education at specialist colleges (nursing college), technical institutes, and/or university. [22]

10The educational success of Samira, the eldest daughter, is particularly remarkable. She first attended school in Algeria, where she had a very good foundation year. But at the age of seven she had to cope with the shock of emigration, of being uprooted, and moving to France (“when I think back to what it was like when we came here, everything is grey”), where she had to start school from scratch, as she did not speak a word of French. She soon overcame this challenge, quickly learned the language, and became a very good pupil from the CP (first grade) onward. [23] She now has vivid memories of school during this period, and a fondness for her elementary school teachers and some of her collège teachers, who she still sees from time to time. The trailblazer among her siblings, described by her younger sister Leïla as “serious” and “hard-working,” it was Samira who forged the upward educational pathway in the family. She not only provided an example to her brothers and sisters (with her faultless report cards and dutiful attitude to school), but also—very closely—supported their education by supervising their work (homework, report cards, etc.) and even going to meet with teachers when necessary, intervening personally when the time came for big decisions (the end of the troisième, or ninth grade, marking the end of collège), in particular to avoid at all costs going to the vocational lycée (high school), which she saw as the stepping stone to unemployment and “issues.”

11From her arrival in France, Samira devoured books and was a frequent visitor to the library at school and in the local community. She also became an ardent proselyte for reading among her brothers and sisters, giving them a reading list at the beginning of each summer vacation and asking them to fill out a reading sheet—in return for a small sum of money. [24] She developed, in her words, a “passion for the French language” that would have taken her into a career as a French teacher if she had been allowed to go to university (her parents did not give her the choice, deciding that she would take a short higher education course at the “local” nursing college). In collège it was Samira who, for example, would help her much better off classmates with their French homework. And visiting these “French people,” as she calls them, she was astonished to discover the affluent interiors of their detached homes. In our first interview, she brought up the enduring memory of one of her friends from collège having not only her own room, but also a piano. Within the family, she continued to act as an educational support and then cultural go-between, bringing in her wake her nearest sister (Leïla) and her younger sisters who, despite a few missteps, all obtained the general or technical baccalaureate.

12The three boys, born between the two sets of daughters in the family, agree unanimously on the value of the—often very restraining—example set by their elder sister’s educational success, along with her constant support. But this was not enough to counteract the dual influence of their family upbringing (the great freedom the boys were given by their mother) and the “neighborhood,” both of which had a negative impact on their schoolwork. Peer pressure, as well as frequent calls from their friends waiting at the base of the building, counteracted all efforts to evade their class destiny. The typical form of social life for boys in the projects in the period 1980–90—“little gangs” of two or three inseparable friends—drew them out of the house like a magnet. The strong pull of social life in the neighborhood, combined with the “privileged” treatment they enjoyed at home, prevented them from acquiring a minimum level of educational self-discipline and time management, the necessary conditions for educational success. Like most of the boys in the neighborhood (which was very early on classified as a ZEP and then a ZUS), [25] none of the male siblings succeeded in going on to the general lycée or obtaining a general baccaleaurate. Only Azzedine, the second eldest boy, managed to pass the vocational baccaleaureate. After a chaotic time at school, Rachid, the eldest, left school before completing collège and for several years led a highly unstable life that eventually saw him behind bars for armed robbery at the age of twenty-one. Mounir, the youngest, left school in the final year of a vocational baccalaureate to start work as a temp at the age of eighteen.

13This major disparity in educational pathways between boys and girls in the same sibling group reflects a strongly gendered mode of socialization in the family, particularly among the eldest children. The two eldest daughters spent their entire childhood studying and doing domestic chores. [26] For a long time Samira, the eldest daughter, shut herself away at home (“for me it was just school/home”), and on several occasions in our interviews described the panicked fear she felt during her childhood at the idea of going “outside” by herself, freely and with no specific objective, as if no escape from the family home could be really free. [27] Conversely, Leïla, three years her junior, affirms having seen what her elder sister was going through, and quickly recognizing the danger of her confinement, which had become more or less “voluntary,” inside the family home. To protect herself from this danger, Leïla patiently developed a strategy for escaping domestic imprisonment. As early as possible, toward the end of elementary school, she began exploring “outside,” albeit in the forms that were permitted by and acceptable to her parents, playing a host of sports and then as a teenager obtaining a BAFA and becoming a youth worker in the neighborhood. [28]

Upward social mobility for the educated daughters, employment for the boys against the odds

14This qualification gap between the boys and girls had a subsequent impact on the career paths taken by the various siblings. The five sisters all chose higher education studies that could guarantee them stable job prospects, while being careful to choose job sectors with a certain general interest: health care (Samira and Dalila became nurses) or social work, in the broad sense of the term (Leïla in a mission locale, the fourth daughter as a children’s social worker, and the youngest daughter in the National Employment Agency). The boys had shorter educational pathways and have experienced bumpier and more chaotic career paths. But strikingly, in comparison with national statistical data, unemployment has played a very small role in the pathways of the three boys, despite their overall lack of qualifications. This is no doubt related to their early start in work, in parallel with the pursuit of education by most of the siblings. To understand this fact, which applies to all eight children, we must bear in mind the ever-present lack of money in the Belhoumi family. For a large period of family life—when their father went on occupational disability and their mother had not yet started working as a cleaner in the collège, between 1980 and 1995—the family purse strings were extremely tight. [29] They all understood that the only solution was to earn pocket money through odd jobs in order to “survive” and most importantly, as teenagers, wear the same clothes as their peers.

15To earn a little money, Samira told me: “I’m the only daughter who wasn’t a youth worker […]. Very early on I took on housework, ironing… I looked after elderly people in the building or babysat.” As for Leïla, and later Dalila and Amel, they all became youth workers in the community centers of their communist-run town. From an earlier age the three boys tested the waters of the world of work by getting started, when they began collège, “on the markets.” From when he was fourteen, and still in the sixième (sixth grade) due to being held back for two years, Rachid would hang around from early in the morning (5 or 6 o’clock) in order to be taken on for the half-day. He immediately took to market life, enjoying the atmosphere and the colorful situations and people around him. He also showed himself to be industrious and good natured and, in return, was recognized as being hard-working, particularly by the butcher who employed him regularly and liked the “little Arab.” The three boys all then began their careers with temporary factory jobs, despite the fact that these jobs were held in contempt by their father—a manual worker with no qualifications who worked in the construction industry—who constantly told his children that he had come to France so that his own children might one day “work with a pen.” This expression, endlessly-repeated in Arabic dialect, made an impression on all of his children as a motto and an expectation. Leïla, the second daughter, recalled having seen her father cry when his eldest son left for his first day as a manual worker “on a construction site.” Given both their father’s image of professional success, and the everyday racism rife on the construction sites, the three sons all sought ways to avoid a future in manual work. Fairly early on, Rachid and Mounir went into “retail”: they became “sales assistants” and were initially highly successful, earning a very good living but also “blowing” their money. [30] Mounir recounted how as a sales representative, working alongside his friend Ali, another “rebeu” [31] from the Nantes region, they were used as “Arabs” to penetrate the market in the projects, “going into apartments”, and selling their products (thermal insulation).

16Azzedine, the second brother, took a different path from his two other brothers. He was the most successful academically, obtaining a vocational baccalaureate, but experienced a long period of unhappiness between the ages of twenty and twenty-four that in a sense “ruined” his career. [32] A major turning point came when he “woke up,” as he puts it, when he realized that RMI was an imminent prospect. [33] During our interview he carefully explained that for him, receiving welfare payments would have meant adopting the typical status of many of his childhood friends and neighbors in the projects, and thus becoming a “loser” in his own eyes and sinking into a social destiny from which he had wanted to escape ever since he gained a form of social consciousness. In a survival reflex, he asked for help from his two sisters in Paris, who were quick to offer him support, guidance, and direction. He moved in with Leïla in Paris, and at her office consulted the list of all the baccalaureate-level entrance examinations open to him. He opted for the RATP entrance examination, and wrote a quick cover letter. Without telling him, Leïla looked over it, rewrote the letter for him and sent the RATP job application off on his behalf. Once again, the helping hand of his sisters was crucial. Azzedine was accepted to take the tests, passed the interviews, came to work in Paris and lived with Leïla for a while before finding a small apartment in the northern inner suburbs of Paris.

17This example demonstrates that the absence of qualifications (or having only a minor qualification) does not necessarily mean prolonged unemployment for the children of north African immigrants. [34] The three brothers in the family have certainly not enjoyed the professional stability of their sisters, nor the upward career progression of the two eldest. [35] But they were still able to secure reasonably stable jobs in the retail sector (for the first and third) and in the public sector for the second, who became an RATP bus driver at the age of twenty-five.

18Finally, these cumulative differences in academic and professional outcomes have had a significant impact on where the children live. The daughters, particularly the eldest, left their home region for Paris and the Paris suburbs fairly early on (Samira and Leïla at the age of twenty-three), and settled there. As they remained single for a long time, they gradually brought their younger sisters to the capital to join them. [36] Their respective apartments acted as a kind of foothold in the Paris region, and their location in the capital played an important role as a “resource center” for all the other family members. The younger ones went there to take shelter during periods of doubt or “blues” for the space and break they needed in order to regain their strength and take their own futures in hand. Conversely, for many years the two least-educated brothers, Rachid and Mounir, lived very close to their parents, in the social housing (HLM) neighborhood of their childhood. When she talked about her brother Rachid (“sensitive” and “touchy”), who she has often looked out for, [37] Samira provided a very good analysis of his need to stay geographically close to his parents: “He needs to be reassured by their presence, he goes and sees our parents every day.” This represents a striking example of gender role reversal among working-class children, since it is usually the daughters who remain geographically close to their parents and are assigned to look after them in their later years.

19The case of Azzedine (born in 1979), the middle brother in the sibling group, is worthy of examination. I held three long, fascinating interviews with him in which we discussed the many contradictions of his positions as “an Arab in Paris.” First as a bus driver with the RATP, where he generally finds it very difficult to cope with being stuck in the middle between the masculine, anti-immigrant world he describes of many CGT (trade union) activists at his depot, and “bearded” colleagues who are wholly absorbed with their religion—often characterized by their overt practice and “provocation”—and always want to get him involved in matters that have little to do with him. And second, as a new resident of the Paris suburbs discovering the habits and customs of a Seine-Saint-Denis project, who has made friends but then gradually moved away and set himself apart from this environment because the local “young hittistes” look down on him for having a job and kowtowing at work. [38] Finding himself knocked back on all sides, he feels like a “country Arab” (his words) in the Paris region and is sometimes tempted to return to his beloved regional city.

Generational differences among the sisters

20The difference between the boys and the girls was starkly apparent from my very first interview with Samira, but over the course of subsequent interviews with each of the sisters, the generational difference among the sisters also attracted my attention. This can first be explained by the objective age gap that separates them, with sixteen years between the eldest and the youngest. But it is above all accentuated by differences in the social contexts in which the two sets of female siblings grew up, and in highly contrasting modes of socialization.

21The eldest two grew up in the working-class suburbs in the years 1975–90, a period during which various social phenomena profoundly altered the relationship that these children of immigrants had to their future, and the way in which they therefore perceived the world. First came the end of securitarian Giscardism, with the left coming to power (1981) and the March for Equality and Against Racism (1983) creating stability for Algerian immigrants in France (with residency cards given from the age of ten, from 1984 onward). This marked the end of the “myth of return” for this community, and the feeling that a future in France was becoming possible for this generation, which was dubbed by the press the “Beur (Arab) generation.” [39] Mitterrand’s first seven-year term marked a clear watershed moment for Algerian immigrants and, despite the failure to introduce voting rights for foreign nationals, presented another image of France to their children, particularly in the face of the emergence of the populist right-wing Front National in 1983–84. [40] Concerns about the future, unease around the authorities, and fear of the administration and the police undoubtedly receded for Algerian immigrants. In a way, Samira and Leïla are the successors of the Beur generation (they were aged thirteen and ten at the time of the march and only have a vague memory of it). They grew up and developed in a kind of parenthesis—a moment in which the vise that had previously gripped the destiny of Algerian immigrants loosened—, during which the children of Algerian immigrants succeeded in their “hard-won” battle for citizenship, and to be recognized as legitimate citizens in a country that had long refused to make their collective existence official. [41] They could thus be said to have benefited from the climate of tolerance that prevailed for several years after the 1983 march. Furthermore, in terms of living conditions and housing, it was a time when, until the early 1980s, HLM areas retained a certain social mix in spite of everything: French manual workers and the lower middle classes had not yet left (or “fled”) these areas, and the children of immigrants grew up with varied friendship groups (French, Algerian, Portuguese, and Spanish). The projects of the 1980s were not entirely cut off: community organizations were present and active, communist activists were still working in the town in which the B. sisters lived, “project activists” were emerging, and contact with adults was frequent. [42]

22While the universe in which they grew up was often still characterized by material poverty and other hardships, the world around them continued to be structured by the community values of working-class communities, such as the importance of hard work. Many did see a distinction between “them” (the “bourgeois,” rich people) and “us” (the projects, young people in the neighborhood), but it was not all-encompassing or insurmountable at that time: there were bridges, and people moving from one world to another, particularly for pupils judged to be “deserving.” In this context where the “us/them” dichotomy did not prevent encounters with other parts of French society, and urban segregation was not yet entrenched, it is interesting to note the diverse musical tastes of this generation, not yet influenced by rap (which did not spread widely in France until the late 1980s). Samira and Leïla thus grew up in an HLM neighborhood that was not yet an immigrant neighborhood: in elementary school, for example, the “little Arabs” were very much in the minority. They remember it being in the mid-1980s, i.e., when they went to collège, that the environmental degradation of their daily lives increased and their apartment building began to become poorer. [43]

23As a sociologist “entering” this family, I was also particularly struck by the differences in appearance, manners, and ways of speaking between the two groups of sisters. Listening to the two eldest sisters speak to each other, I noted their taste for using proper words and appropriate vocabulary, observed the various forms of linguistic hypercorrection employed by Samira, and heard them talk with a great deal of deference and admiration about their “professeurs” (or teachers: they use the word in full, rather than the common abbreviation “profs,” demonstrating great respect), and anything to do with culture. This indicates both the strength of their desire for acculturation—to express it more bluntly, their desire to be like other people (like “French people”)—and also the ability of the school system of the period to fulfil this desire by foregrounding the norms of academic or literary culture. My interviews with Samira were full of this ambition to rise above her condition, to achieve the “well-educated” norm, and of her desire—which she felt very strongly as a teenager—to “break through the barrier,” both social and racial in nature. [44] When choosing which lycée to attend (in 1986), Samira wanted to avoid the local general lycée and was successfully accepted to the bourgeois lycée in the nearby city, taking Arabic as her third language option. There she came into contact with a strange new world—the bedrock of local bourgeoisie, who could sometimes be “charming” to this little immigrant star pupil—and began a friendship with a fellow bac ES pupil (“blonde, and already doing modelling work”) that brought her into contact with luxury apartments for the first time. Samira was strongly struck by the “beauty” (a word she often uses) of the people and places she saw, which she would also later find in Paris. [45] At one point she was friendly with another girl, “a bourgeois Catholic” whom she come across one day in the street addressing her father with the highly formal second person “vous.” She also discovered the dress codes of the local bourgeoisie (bottle green, Loden-style coats, etc.), cutting her long hair short and, a few years later, lightly coloring it.

24I was also struck by the “character” of the two eldest sisters, with their strong personalities owing much to the fact that it was they alone who forged the path of upward social mobility, and who, step by step and slowly and painfully, had to win forms of independence and rights. First, the simple right to continue their studies, then the right to put off marriage, the right to choose their partner, and even the right to divorce (when, as in Samira’s case, her first marriage soon turned out to be a “disaster”). [46] It was also the two eldest who in turn truly socialized their parents, particularly their mother: once she had children, Samira involved her mother in various ways, taking her on holiday (to Turkey and Morocco) with her two young daughters. The children recently bought her a smartphone and she has quickly mastered the device, sending multiple texts and photos to her various children all year round.

25As observed above, there is a stark difference in socialization between the two eldest and the three youngest sisters. First, these latter grew up in a neighborhood that had become poor, in a harsher environment (drugs, for example, were a permanent presence in the neighborhood), where social relations were strained and the aggressive masculinity of boys written off from education was increasingly apparent. [47] This was the “génération de cité” (project generation). [48] Second, at home they were raised by aging and economically more vulnerable parents. They never knew their father in work (by then he was on occupational disability) and to make ends meet their mother went to work outside the household. They were also educated in elementary schools and collèges in the neighborhood that were more socially and ethnically homogeneous, with teachers who seem to have been less committed than their predecessors to their job of teaching and liberating “young immigrants.” [49] As a result, they all described the damage caused by being labelled early on as “living in the T. project”). This experience did not leave them unscathed, particularly in relation to the way they speak. During her frequent visits home Samira, who was always mindful of the issue, gradually noticed that her younger sisters, who became teenagers in the early 2000s, did not talk “properly” but began to talk like “project” girls, and to add “Arab” words into their conversation. [50] Their elder sister thus made major efforts, from a distance, to get them back on track, take them out of the neighborhood, invite them to Paris, and show them a world outside the projects. But, despite this, the differences remain: first, two of the three younger sisters do not have the same love of reading and culture, and got married earlier (the sixth child had her first baby at the age of twenty-nine, while the very youngest was twenty-seven) to husbands “from the cité.” The example of Nadia, the youngest of the siblings, is especially illuminating, particularly for understanding the tensions raised by her desire to leave the neighborhood. She avoided the local lycée (where she would have been with lots of friends from the project) and chose a lycée in the center of the nearby bourgeois city. But during her four years at the lycée, she continued a relationship (which began at the end of collège) with an “unsuitable” young man from the neighborhood. During this period, she continually went back and forth between these two groups: the one she had grown up with (friends from the neighborhood) and the one to which she aspired, with girls from well-off neighborhoods who were also specializing in literature at the lycée. She tried to find herself, declared herself to be an atheist, did little schoolwork, began smoking cannabis (provided for free by her boyfriend) on a daily basis, and retook her senior year (2005). Her aging parents no longer had any influence over her, and her big sisters were too far away and felt powerless to help. The year after taking her baccalaureate, she broke up with her boyfriend, stopped smoking, turned over a new leaf, went back to youth work, and succeeded in getting into the social work college. There she met the son of Moroccan immigrants, very steady and religious, who was a very calming influence on her.

Conclusion

26As a result of both their professional and social choices and the national sociopolitical context, the opposition between the boys and girls created by what we might call the educational differential has worn off over time. Certain alliances have also formed among the siblings that would seem improbable on paper. At the end of an interview with Amel (the seventh child) in July 2012, she told me that her two nearest sisters—Dalila and Nadia—jokingly criticized her for having been “bleached,” i.e., gone over to the side of “the French.” This joking relationship was significant and circulated among the siblings. Six months later, I held a long interview with Rachid (Dalila was also present, pregnant with her first child and back from her home in the Midi so that she could give birth near her parents) in the house that he had just rented in a small town three miles from his old neighborhood. In the car, as Rachid drove us back to his parents’ house, we discussed the differences between the brothers and sisters, and I took the opportunity to ask him about this cutting term used to describe Amel. “Yes, it’s true,” began Rachid laughing, “Amel’s a bit bleached… But,” he continued, “she’s coming back… She’s coming back…” (i.e. she is returning to the world of Arabs, religion, and toward the norm).

27Ultimately, what lies behind this expression? An accusation, in the watered-down form of a joking relationship, that Amel (who lives alone in Paris) has gone over alone “to the other side,” and has sought to cross the “racial barrier” that her accusers believe has built up in French society over the last decade. The same accusation could easily be levelled also at the two eldest sisters, but they are in a way protected by their marital status (married or living with men of Algerian origin), their continual “family support” role (economically, socially, and morally), and their status as the family stars, which is unanimously recognized by their six younger siblings. We should note that the broader context of this demand for conformity with the world of origin was itself significant: nationally, the employment situation in France was becoming more difficult, and tensions were growing between increasingly racialized “communities.” On a more personal level, Rachid was losing hope of changing careers by finding a stable teaching job, while Dalila, who had lived in the Midi for a year, was having to contend with a racism that she had not anticipated (and had never been subjected to in her home region of Poitou-Charentes), as well as the need to set herself apart from the majority Moroccan community, against whom local resentment was building. Afterwards, I had a clearer understanding of the significance of the presence of the “three sisters” at the evening to mark the anniversary of the mission locale in Montville: they were there to unlock the mysteries of immigrant integration, keep in touch with the intellectual world, and refuse to give up in the face of what they perceive as the community in which they grew up turning inward. Sociologists do not therefore provide excuses, but “keys” to understanding injustice and thwarting destiny.

28Following this extensive journey through the educational and professional paths taken by the B. siblings (without space to consider each child’s marital history), has this ethnographic approach shed any light on the various processes of social mobility already revealed by statistical surveys? In relation to intergenerational mobility, it further highlights the enduring value of qualifications, the importance of conditions of socialization, the power of gendered attitudes in Algerian families, the “beneficial” effect on girls’ education of restricting their freedom of movement and, conversely, the negative impact of the family privileges accorded to boys. At the same time, the upward trajectories of the eldest sisters very clearly show the importance of personal encounters (teachers for Samira, youth workers for Leïla) that marked a number of small—but decisive—steps on their journey. They also illustrate the crucial role played by redistribution of the small amount of capital developed along the way by the two elder sisters among their siblings, to the benefit of the youngest. This includes informational capital (relating to school and the ins and outs of getting a job), financial capital (lending them a hand from time to time), cultural capital (access to books and places of culture), moral capital (when the sisters helped their eldest brother deal with the police and justice system), and professional capital (when Leïla helped Azzedine get a job with the RATP), along with many other examples I could provide. In short, large Algerian families like the Bs., with its two eldest sisters as drivers of mobility among the siblings, continually consolidated and unified by the eldest sister’s daily (or near-daily) efforts to mobilize and collectivize, offer collective resources that in the medium-term may limit or counteract the initially negative effects of their size and economic poverty. We should also acknowledge the specific impact, implicitly referred to above, of various institutions on the social and professional journeys of these siblings. Highlighting the central role of school education may be a truism, but noting the differentiating effect of successive generations of teachers on the outcomes for working-class children is less so, and is worthy of in-depth analysis. Equally, we should take care not to reduce the difference in boy/girl pathways to the sole effects of family and school socialization, and not forget the powerfully destabilizing role of lived racism—ordinary or institutional racism, which is also highly gendered for the children of Algerian immigrants (at least until the recent headscarf controversy). It is no coincidence that the two eldest sisters report having experienced very little racism, while lived racism—notably in relations with the police or at soccer stadiums—is at the heart of the brothers’ social existence, and plays a major role in the difficulty they, unlike their two eldest sisters, have in identifying with France or the French.

29When it comes to intragenerational mobility, considering a certain temporal dynamic allows us—particularly for the female siblings—to reveal the structural barriers to upward mobility linked to the decline in living conditions for working-class families and the environment in the projects in the years 1985–2000.