A harmony of difference

I looked out over the sea of bobbing heads packed into the narrow artery of Calle Gerona in Béjar, a jubilant tangle of limbs, laughter and sweat beneath a sagging awning, and marvelled at the synchronicity. The crowd moved as one, a single organism breathing in rhythm, swaying in time to each pulse and pause we threw at them. We, just a few feet above on a makeshift stage, were swept along by their rising ecstasy. The wooden planks and metal rails that separated us dissolved in the current of music, that oldest of languages, older than nation, deeper than tongue.

We were a ragtag, accidental symphony of global driftwood. A drummer from a forgotten Extremaduran village where the cork oaks meet shockingly green fields of corn and the more muted olive groves. A bassist from the working-class sprawl of Madrid's commuter belt. A keyboardist with roots that spanned three continents - Dutch, Indian, Surinamese, his fingers fluent in the dialects of jazz and the deepest classical stylings. And me... a Canadian woven together from four restless European ancestries, the genetic residue of those who had fled famines, forced and otherwise, wars, and fading dreams to stake a claim in the New World, only to drift back east again in search of meaning.

At one point, I leaned into the mic and asked the crowd: "How many of you are from somewhere else?" A cheer rose, and hands shot up like birds startled from a wire. One by one, voices called out: every corner of Iberia! France! Italy! Romania! The UK! The US! Morocco! Côte d'Ivoire! A girl with jet-black bangs shouted, "Macau!" between sips of shared tinto de verano, her grin bashful and sunlit.

And here we were, all of us, vibrating to a groove born from the unthinkable. A sound first forged in bondage, blues, jazz, soul, music that rose from the fractured hearts of Africans torn from home and cast across the ocean. They brought with them rhythm, defiant and alive, and mingled it with the hymns and harmonies of their captors' parlours. The result was a sound that felt like wide skies and sorrow, the ghost of a train whistle in the distance, the ache of exile softened by the shimmer of becoming something new. It was, paradoxically, the music of freedom - freedom imagined, wrestled, sung into being.

There were no morality police prowling the cobblestones, checking that everyone had on the approved brand of alpargatas or executing the sanctioned steps of some church-issued jota. No purity inspectors stood at the end of the street swabbing cheeks and tracing genealogies. If any on the far right were present, they kept silent, bearing their torment quietly before that most Spanish of ideas: convivencia.

Before me was a metaphor for society itself: people from everywhere, locals and forasteros alike enjoying themselves under the protection of the laws of a liberal European democracy. Here no one was illegal for the mere reason of their place of birth. No one was judged here by the make-up of their DNA, but instead for what they do, how they act and what they believe.

And yet, outside the music's reach, beyond the sway of song, borders (and hearts) still harden. Bureaucracies grind slowly, often cruelly, parsing worth by passport, not by character. Somewhere, a child sleeps in a detention center for the crime of dreaming in the wrong direction. Somewhere else, demagogues stir resentment like a pot, seasoning it with fear, offering the bland lie that sameness is safety.

But not here.

Today, in this overlooked corner of Castile, under a sky full of stars with no nationality, the world came together in a riff, a rhythm, a roar. We weren't foreigners, or hosts. Just us - a harmony of difference.

And if a culture is judged by how it dances, let this be our answer: the future doesn't march - it grooves. And it grooves together.