| Sumario: | Violeta Salama's debut film Alegría (2021) explores Jewish life in Melilla as a unique site of convivencia in contemporary Spain. This essay interprets the characters' enactments of female-centered rituals as expressions of a Jewish feminist praxis that has developed since the 1970s. The rituals analyzed center reconciliation and interreligious continuities as correctives to the Spanish State's restrictive policies towards Moroccan migration. In the film, Melilla's strategic position as a Spanish autonomous city on the North African coast acutely punctuates this problem and also offers solutions through its ethnoreligious diversity. In presenting convivencia to a contemporary audience, Alegría resignifies a variety of colonial and neoliberal cultural imaginaries of Sephardi Jews and al-Andalus. Foregrounding music as a means of affirming Jewish and, to a lesser degree, Muslim sonic indigeneity, the ritual improvisations analyzed herein repurpose these ideas to affirm Jewish belonging in a national landscape that otherwise effaces the experiences of religious minorities. Ultimately, a sororal convivencia emerges as central to articulating Sephardi and Spanish Jewish identities.
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