The Spanish colonial enterprise in Morocco brought to the forefront a collective crisis of cultural identity and the fragile image that Spanish writers, photographers, and journalists held of their own nation. In this sense, Morocco serves as a vortex both for national anxieties and aspirations, inviting two opposing questions: ‘where do we come from?’ and ‘what do we define ourselves against?’ These questions are answered from a range of ideological perspectives, particularly in early articulations of fascism and revolutionary socialism, and in ways that reveal the significant link between the colonial wars in Morocco and the development of Spanish nationalism in the decades leading up to the Spanish Civil War. It is worth noting that the Rif War also had an impact on the development of peripheral nationalisms, which were and continue to be narrativised within the framework of colonial oppression. Race and culture remain ever-shifting terrains in relationships between the central and peripheral regions of the Iberian Peninsula.

Ultimately, Spanish discourse on Moroccan Muslim and Jewish ‘brothers’ and ‘Others’ reveals more about Spain's self-image than it does about these colonised cultures. In fact it reveals hardly anything about the rich cultural heterogeneity of the Rif, Moroccan narratives of the colonial relationship, or the social and political realities it produced. What it does illuminate are spaces of resistance to colonial penetration that are located at the limits, in the fissures, and between the lines (or within the images) of colonial discourse. These spaces of resistance are especially visible in documentary photography of the protectorate: impenetrable walls enclosing the Moroccan home; veils barring Spanish access to Moroccan women; bodies of Spanish soldiers that are literally pulled apart by the Moroccan colonial resistance as a dramatic gesture of refusal of Spanish penetration into their territory. For an audience unaccustomed to the power of the image, these photographs were stark truthtelling narratives about the failures of Spanish colonisation. In this way, they can be interpreted as a form of agency for the colonised culture from within the very structures of the discourse of the coloniser.