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Abstract: This comparative and qualitative research examines the types of ethnic, racial, religious, and social identification that NorthAfrican second generations adopted in a banlieue of Paris and a peripheral barrio of Madrid. Four types of self-identification were detected in the neighborhood of Les Bosquets (Paris) and three in the neighborhood of San Cristobal (Madrid). In Les Bosquets, isolation, Islamophobia and the relationships with the police give rise to a "reactive ethnicity"; a new conservative Islam gains many followers ("Muslim self-identification"); race appears for the first time as an element of self-identification ("indigenous selfidentification") and secularism has waned ("laic selfidentification"). In San Cristóbal, a significant share still feels like immigrants ("immigrant identification"); a new SpanishMuslim generation ("hybrid self-identification") is born, and the most vulnerable youth adopt a conservative Islam while simultaneously developing a sense of "neighborhood pride" and identification with the working class ("neighborhood identification").
Keywords: Islam, Islamophobia, North African background, second generations, segregated neighborhoods, self-identification.
Understanding how children from a Muslim background living in disadvantaged areas have adapted to European countries like France and Spain is theoretically important and a key policy issue. Because children of the Muslim population in some French banlieues make up more than 76% of the total population (Tribalat, 2010), their fate is enormously essential to this country's future. Though in Spain the percentage is lower - 10% in certain urban areas and between 15% and 19% for the either second or 1.5 generation (Gebhardt et al., 2007)- institutional concern for their integration has increased since the terrorist attacks in 2004 and 2017, as it has in France since the massacre in 2015. Thus, understanding why some young people succeed, and others stagnate and how they deal with their own racial and religious identification, their family heritage, and mainstream culture is essential. These issues have become a matter of public discussion and scholarly research in the past few decades in many migrant-receiving countries (Alba & Waters, 2011; Berry et al., 2006; Crul et al., 2012; Gurer, 2019; Portes & Zhou, 1993).
The aim of the results presented in this paper2 is to fill a gap in the understanding of the complex and diverse forms of self-identification of Muslim youth in specific disadvantaged urban areas of Europe. A sample of 143...