Andalusians

A city, in other words, being actively built out of the displaced hopes of two distinct communities of exiles, each bringing with it the particular skills, learning, and traditions of the homeland it had left behind.

This detail, that the family is not merely fleeing toward an empty refuge, but toward a city already being shaped by another community of displaced people, the Andalusians who had settled on the far bank of the river some years prior, settles into Fatima's imagination with particular force.

She begins to understand her family's migration not as an isolated misfortune, but as part of a larger pattern, a movement of peoples across the Maghreb in these turbulent decades, each group carrying with it fragments of a world it had lost and the determination to rebuild something enduring from those fragments in new soil.

"They say," an older woman traveling with a neighboring family tells Fatima one evening, as the two sit near a fire mending a torn cloak, "that the two peoples do not mix easily at first.

The Andalusians keep to their side of the river, and we will keep to ours.

But a city is a river, too, in its way.

It finds its own course over time, whatever the people within it intend." Fatima turns this thought over for the rest of the journey, the way she has always turned over ideas that catch and hold her attention.

Fez in these decades was, in truth, two cities rather than one, separated by the river that ran through its heart.

Yeah, and we've learned also in our time

here about like the Spanish accent and how it's changed so much from Latin American accent because a lot of Southern Spaniards, Andalusians, who have a distinct accent than the rest of mainland Spain, went to the Canary Islands.

A lot of them were the sailors who went to America and they stopped in the Canary Islands and the Canary Islands over to Latin America.

And that's what the Canarianos also...