A Corridor City Choir Rehearses in Two Languages and One Drought

MURCIA — On the same avenue where next month's water vote has set neighbor against neighbor, a community choir of about sixty voices meets twice a week to rehearse a concert none of them will call political. Half its members arrived in the last three years along the migration corridors that have carried registered climate migrants past 120 million; the other half have watered these streets their whole lives. They rehearse in Spanish and Arabic and a working pidgin of hand signals, and the program is deliberately ordinary — folk songs, a lullaby, one piece written for the occasion. "We are not solving the water," said choir director Amina Cherif, who fled a dried corridor farther south. "We are practicing being a city that still sings while it argues." The concert is scheduled for the week after the municipal vote, whichever way it falls. Cherif said that was the point: to book a shared evening that survives the ballot. Rehearsal, she noted, is the only room in Murcia where the line down the street does not run.