Salmon Rushdie wrote that the 20th century was the era of vast migrations. True. But it’s not as though it didn’t happen before. In fact, movement was the hallmark of Mediterranean life, and not just for the Phoenicians. Here in Mojacar Pueblo, in the southeastern tip of Andalucia, it’s possible to find traces of past Romans, Moors, Jews, Galicians, and more recently expat Danes and English, among the local Andalucians, themselves a mixture of the many peoples who have passed through here.

Southeastern Almeria is the most remote tip of Andalucia, the old Moorish caliphate of al-Andalus, and far off the tourist track. I’ve been fortunate to be awarded a creative residency at Fondacion Valparaiso, set in an ancient olive mill, that was established by the Danish artist Paul Beckett and his wife Beatrice, who lived most of their adult lives in the valley just outside Mojacar Pueblo. Few creative artists leave this kind of legacy, affording other artists the opportunity for uninterrupted work.

We’re a small group, only seven (the eighth, a Danish writer, had to cancel at the last minute); in keeping with the spirit of the place, we embody the new internationalism while harkening back to old patterns of migration. The men of our group include Steve, a poet and novelist from Canada and Frank, a composer of serious contemporary music, from the U.S. Gaurav, now American and living in New Orleans, hails from Mumbai via Uganda; not surprisingly, he is an expert on post-colonial writing. He’s also the bon vivant of the group, organizing excursions to the seaside restaurants of the neighboring town of Garuccha, or the cafes of Mojacar Plaja.
We four women embody the migrations of the Mediterranean world. Tanja, a painter who layers botanical silhouettes on abstract graphics, and is also now American, maintains dual citizenship with her original home in Bosnia; hailing from the cosmopolitan Sarajevo of the former Yugoslavia, she speaks sadly of the dangers of outmoded ethnic rivalries. Yesim, poet and conceptual installation artist, hails from Istanbul; carrying Azerbaijani heritage, she weaves tales of the refuge offered by the Ottomans to threatened peoples, and worries about the growing Islamic fundamentalism in her country. I’m in Spain searching for the lost Jewish world, so I know that the old Ottoman Empire welcomed most of the Sephardic Jews expelled from Reconquista Spain in 1492.

Lucy, an Israeli artist who works with inks and letters, weaves her Israeli haiku into delicately whimsical pieces. Of our group, she is the most fluent in Spanish, having lived her first fourteen years in Uruguay before conditions there became difficult, even dangerous, for Jews. Her forebears came from Poland, as did my parents. With Ashkenazi heritage, born in Norway when it was among the first countries to offer haven to post-WWII Jewish refugees, raised in Canada, I share a similarly complex family history. My search for traces of Isaac the Blind, Sephardic kabbalist, likely ancestor, link me to this Mediterranean landscape and its history of population shifts.