Another quick post. I am currently at the Festival de Las Américas in the eastern side of downtown Madrid. The festival is an enormous street party celebrating the various cultures of Latin America. I am watching a Cuban hip hop group that is performing on a bus that has been converted into a traveling stage. Two other groups - a banda guatamalteca and a brazilian pop band - are performing north and south of the hip hop band's bus, respectively.
The buses are traveling through one of the main streets that head east from the heart of Madrid; it is hard for me to calculate the number of people in the streets, but it easily looks to be in the low thousands. The crowd is quite diverse, ranging from Madrilenos to Central American immigrants waving the flags of their respective countries (naturally I am waving El Salvador's flag). It is quite a sight seeing this many flags in one location in the city. As I will discuss in another post, immigration is a major issue that is impacting Spain in a variety of ways. For now it is simply of the sea of flags traveling through the streets of Madrid as one large celebration that reflects the positive aspects of a city learning to embrace the diversity transforming its social landscape.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment