After a year and a half in pandemic exile in Los Angeles, I made it home to a village at the foot of the Bani Mountains, my bled, Lamhamid (fig. 1). Bled connotes a rural expanse, kinship, ancestors, and ways of being. It is the local and the familiar. I was not the only native returnee in the village that summer of 2021. Everywhere I turned I met migrants who had traveled back to the bled. This was unusual for the many villagers who live and work in Morocco’s economic capital, Casablanca, as well as other urban centers in the country and beyond (Adam).
Indeed, summers were usually lucrative for migrant villagers, typically enmeshed in urban service economies. Hamid from the province of Tata was one such example. For three decades, Hamid resided in Casablanca, laboring as a personal wash-servant in a public bath...
