In Phoenix, a Choir of the Displaced Fills a Cooling Center

PHOENIX — On the hottest afternoons, the cooling center on Van Buren Street becomes a concert hall. Each week some two hundred people — many of them among the migrants who have moved through the southwestern corridors this year — gather in the municipal heat refuge not only to escape the temperature but to sing. The choir, assembled by retired music teacher Gloria Estévez from a dozen languages and as many home countries, has become an unlikely fixture of the city's long summer. "We could not agree on much," Estévez said, "so we agreed on a melody." The center's director noted that attendance at the cooling hours rose once the singing began; people who came for the air conditioning stayed for the company. In a century that counts the displaced by the hundred million, the choir is a reminder that each figure in the ledger arrives carrying a voice — and sometimes, given a cool room and an hour, chooses to use it.