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When I lived in Spain, I became the third person (that I know of) to fall completely in love with one of my colleagues, a Basque, trumpet-playing climber, who in twenty years of life, had never consumed more than a single bite of any vegetable. He also had a mullet with white boy dreads in the back. Not my finest moment.

I stumbled into teaching upright bass in a nonprofit children’s orchestra in Bilbao, a city in the North of Spain, while studying abroad. Modeled off a whole system of free children’s community orchestras in Venezuela, the nonprofit’s mission was to combat social exclusion by offering free classical instrument rentals and lessons for any child aged eight to seventeen. In addition to the lessons, we held weekly orchestra rehearsals in San Francisco, Bilbao’s joint immigrant and gay neighborhood, where many of our students’ families lived. Most were the children of immigrants or had immigrated with their families themselves. Some had immigrated alone as minors.

Besides bass, students could study violin, viola, cello, or trumpet, from the boy who had managed to avoid eating a whole serving of any green food in two decades, which I learned at a community lunch in our first week of working together. I had just broken eight years of vegetarianism, yet the aversion to salad still didn’t deter me.

Maybe because our bosses told me they thought we would make the perfect couple when they learned I also climb or because I desperately wanted to assimilate into Basque culture in the city, and I saw a Basque partner as a pathway to belonging, I developed an unrequited crush that at times had me considering stepping in front of municipal buses out of embarrassment. I wouldn’t say he was any more handsome than average, and the haircut certainly didn’t help, but my cheeks still turned cherry slushie red whenever he spoke to me, which was infrequently and always regarding orchestra business. He was kind enough to never point it out, but he was never kind enough to acknowledge me in the quad of the university we both attended, where all the Spanish students went to smoke in the breaks bisecting our two-hour classes. Luckily for my academic performance, we didn’t share any classes. I studied literature and modern languages. He studied social work, and his job at the orchestra served as a sort of paid practicum.

I only learned that the cello/viola teacher also loved him when the violin teacher started making fun of both of us for it, and I suspected that the violinists made fun of us because he liked the trumpet teacher too. We were all in line behind the trumpet player’s actual girlfriend, a college student, who was, incidentally, Spanish. I wonder if the violin and cello teachers also liked him because we were all immigrants or expats; they came from Venezuela and were the best musicians of the group. They both played in their country’s youth orchestras and studied in the music conservatory in Bilbao, a building I was not skilled enough to enter as a bass player. The trumpet teacher was never a conservatory student either, but he was Basque, born and raised in Bilbao, and I suspect all of us subconsciously recognized that a good way to gain acceptance in a foreign country is to partner up with someone from there. He could have been any of our tickets to the dominant culture.

Even though I could reason that I only liked him because I wanted to fit in, and there were objectively better choices in my social circles for crushes, nothing, not the girlfriend, not the cello teacher, not the haircut, nor the potentially pathological hatred of salad, could snap me out of it.

What finally ended my crush wasn’t my pride but his.

In addition to the cello/viola teacher, the violin teacher, the trumpet player, and I, the orchestra had a piano instructor. She was a retired Basque schoolteacher, and she had at least four decades and iotas of life experience on the rest of us. She was unfailingly kind.

“I don’t want to be Basque anymore,” she said one day when we were all cleaning up after a weekly rehearsal. I knew she wouldn’t make a statement like that lightly, and I waited for an explanation.

“We’ve done too many horrible things,” she said, zipping a soft case around the orchestra’s keyboard.

She probably meant ETA, the Basque nationalist terrorist group, which was active until 2011. But I suspect it had more to do with how the Basque Country treats immigrants.

The Basque Country is an autonomous community in Spain, their equivalent of an American state. It has its own official language—in addition to Spanish—police force, and municipal government services, including healthcare.

Despite, or maybe because, of the long history of persecution of Basque people, the Basques have always been insular. Just as Hitler drew inspiration for the Holocaust and ethnic purity from the United States’ treatment of ethnic and racial minorities, he also drew inspiration from the Basques. Although that didn’t stop him from bombing the Basque village of Gernika on a market day for his buddy Francisco Franco in 1937, killing several hundred civilians. During Franco’s dictatorship after the Spanish Civil War, complete repression of Basque language and culture led to the formation of ETA, which started as a covert student organization at the University of Deusto. That’swhere I, the trumpet player, and his girlfriend all studied.

Today, a requirement for working for the municipal government in the Basque Country is speaking proficient Basque, also known as Euskera. The result is that people who grew up in traditionally Basque families who speak Basque, have preference for employment. On one hand, I welcome this policy as a form of reparations for the dictatorship. It prioritizes the descendants of the Indigenous culture of the Basque Country over other Spaniards. As someone who believes my own country has a lot of atoning to do for its treatment of ethnic minorities, especially Indigenous people, I appreciate it. But on the other hand, this system financially penalizes immigrants because of discrepancies in language education. Schools in immigrant neighborhoods usually focus on Spanish, so even second and third generation immigrants have a harder time accessing higher education and are effectively excluded from public sector jobs.

Since law enforcement is one of those jobs, the police force is almost exclusively ethnically Basque, resulting in police violence against immigrants, who are often People of Color from Africa and Latin America. When I had to get fingerprinted to be allowed to work with children for the orchestra, and the FBI sent me a fingerprint card and instructions to take it to the nearest police station, all the officers I saw were exclusively Basque, or at least white and speaking Euskera. The people they had arrested were exclusively Black African men. When I told the other teachers afterwards, the cello teacher joked with me.

“That station is where they disappear immigrants.” She laughed, but her eyes didn’t. She had immigrated to Spain with her family when it became unsafe for them to remain in Venezuela. Even though she spent most of her adolescence in Bilbao, without Spanish citizenship, she couldn’t afford to go to college, so she worked for the orchestra instead. Despite liking the Basque trumpet teacher, maybe because he’s Basque, I suspect she agrees with the piano teacher about the way the Basque Country treats immigrants.

But when the piano teacher said she didn’t want to be Basque anymore, the trumpet player got prickly.

“Well,” he said, “men do a lot of terrible things too, but that doesn’t mean I want to stop being one.” As if shame influences gender identity. And as if that is somehow equivalent to being embarrassed of your country’s racism and xenophobia. As a nonbinary American, I can dispute both those ideas—because I too am often ashamed of my country.

“I want to stop being American,” I said and hugged the piano teacher. The trumpet player shook his head and walked away, sweeping his mullet dreads from the front of his shoulders to his back defensively, like chain mail deflecting our shame for our countries.

What the trumpet player couldn’t see was that, as a white dude with Basque ancestry and competency in Euskera, he has opportunities in Bilbao many of our students could only dream of. And if a social work student who works with immigrant kids and the children of immigrants can’t understand that, I don’t have a lot of hope for the rest of the Basque Country.

I do not have the same ties to my ancestor’s cultures as many young Basque people have to theirs, and after the dictatorship and the oppression and physical violence many Basque people survived under fascism, I would never ask anyone to dampen that pride. I’ve experienced first hand what happens when you have to give up your culture to survive in the dominant society; my father’s family comes from the mixed Indigenous and Spanish colonial Hispano community in Southern Colorado. His grandparents didn’t teach their children Spanish and encouraged them to marry white folks, so their children could have more opportunities in the United States. I wish there was as much effort to revitalize and protect Hispano culture in Colorado as there is to revitalize and protect Basque culture in Bilbao. I wish my father had the same incentives and opportunities to relearn Spanish as Basque youth have to learn Euskera today. I wish I had them.

In many ways, I was just an observer in the orchestra. I don’t know if the interaction between the piano and trumpet teachers was a continuation of a previous conversation. I don’t know how the dictatorship affected the trumpet player’s family. I just know, in that moment, I identified a lot more with the piano teacher, and the trumpet player’s reaction made me not like him as much. It reminded me a lot of the way my white family and friends get defensive talking about racism and xenophobia in America.

On my walk home from that orchestra rehearsal, I stopped at a river-side open-air cafe and listened to some live jazz music. Like me, jazz was born in America. I started playing upright bass because I wanted to play jazz. It’s one of the definitively American things I feel truly proud of, but I also know that it’s a direct product of slavery and segregation; it was born when conservatory-educated Creole people in New Orleans played music with formerly-enslaved Blues performers because Jim Crow laws restricted where People of Color could perform and practice. The Creole musicians weren’t allowed to perform classical music, so they taught their Black blues-playing bandmates classical theory and produced a technically complicated, extremely popular genre of music that literally defined America in the 20th century.

It’s not entirely true that I don’t want to be American. I want America to do better. I had hoped that studying abroad might show me ways other countries treat immigrants and ethnic minorities better, but I didn’t discover that in the Basque Country. I just saw how they discriminate against immigrants differently than we do in the United States, and I suspect I would have found the same thing wherever I studied in Spain.

So I wish I hadn’t said I don’t want to be American. I should have said I wish my country would do better too because changing and taking steps to repair harm doesn’t mean being less proud of one’s culture. It means not translating that pride into superiority. I don’t think the United States is any better than the Basque Country. On the contrary, I was hoping the Basque Country would be better, but it wasn’t, and maybe that’s the lesson. I assumed I could learn to fix my country the first place I went when I left it and found more problems instead. But I also got to play music with kids from four continents every week and watch their families support each other in the face of those problems. It reminded me of jazz, making something beautiful and beneficial despite barriers, and that did teach me how to make my country a better place—through community.

So, between sets at the cafe, I chatted with someone cute sitting alone at the bar, and when I left, I walked along the curb next to the passing city busses, and didn’t think about the trumpet player at all.

Kira Córdova is a writer and sometimes tall ship sailor from the great seafaring state of Colorado working on an MFA in Nature Writing at Western Colorado University. They have poems upcoming in the anthology Anger is a Gift from Flowersong Press and are the editor of a collection of their grandmother's poetry: Carma: How It Is.