Editor’s Note: This week’s post continues exploration of America at 250 and its meaning and invitations. Greg Cantori, a friend who has moved to Spain and shared other posts on life there with us, offers an interesting perspective on America at 250 and our connection to a small town in southern Spain. 

I spent this Fourth of July with my family in a tiny village in southern Spain, watching Spaniards celebrate the birth of our country.

Not a casual celebration. Not a tourist gimmick. A full-throated, parade-through-the-cobblestones, flags-and-muskets and fireworks American-style-barbecue celebration in a mountain town called Macharaviaya (MAH-cha-ra-vee-AY-uh), population 400. Spanish families in colonial military uniforms. Children waving flags. A reenacted military band marching to drums. Two flags flying side by side: the red-and-gold of Spain, and the stars-and-stripes of the United States.

I stood there as an American, feeling something I didn’t expect: gratitude, embarrassment, and a strange kind of hope, all braided together.

Macharaviaya doesn’t celebrate our independence because they love American consumerism or current policies. They celebrate because one of their own – a boy born in this village in 1736 named Bernardo de Galvez – helped make American independence possible. As governor of Spanish Louisiana, Galvez funneled weapons, money, and intelligence to the colonists. He pinned down British forces in Florida, including a brilliant victory in Pensacola, preventing them from reinforcing Yorktown. Meanwhile the French fleet sailed into the Chesapeake along the exact route we also sailed on Goodwind, our sailboat and home for eight years, docking exactly where the French frigates did to help us fight and win. Galvez held the southern line, making the victory at Yorktown possible. My family has felt this deep sense of interwoven history across many places along the intracoastal waterway and now here, in Macharaviaya, Spain.

The American Revolution was not, by a long shot, a solo act. It was a team effort. France sent fleets and troops that camped and fought alongside the Continental army. For every American member there was a French fighter in Yorktown.. 

Spain sent Galvez and supplies. The Dutch provided loans. It was not only the French who were foreign-born; over 30% of the colonists in the Continental ranks were themselves recent immigrants born and raised in Scotland, England, Germany, Poland and Ireland. The continental army did not win alone. They won only because they were willing to ask and receive help for their cause. They understood that independence does not mean going it alone but relying on the help and kindness of others.

And yet this self-made myth is the American gospel we preach loudest. The bootstraps. The lone genius. The rugged individual who needs no one. We have turned the founding of a nation built on alliances and diversity in the face of adversity into a story of solitary triumph. We have leaders who mock cooperation, demonize immigrants, and treat help as a weakness. We have forgotten that the very independence we celebrate was made possible by strangers and foreigners who saw our cause as their own. Strangers are just friends you haven’t met yet. 

Standing in that village square, watching serious reenactors march past a banner reading “Una Causa, Un Nombre” – One Cause, One Name – I thought about what we’ve lost. Galvez didn’t just ask “what’s in it for Spain?” He saw a cause worth supporting and threw his weight behind it. The colonists didn’t pretend they had everything they needed. They asked for help, accepted it, and built a nation on the understanding that we are stronger together. We even coined a phrase and designed a flag showing a dissected snake: United we stand, divided we fall.

America at 250 should be a mature country, not a terrified one. We should be secure enough to welcome immigrants as Spain is welcoming my family and just as the young United States welcomed the help of foreigners. We should be open to the kindness of strangers. We should be wise enough to invest in our collective future, as Spain invests in its universal healthcare and education where its citizens are living much longer, healthier lives than ours. (In fact, by 2040, Spain is on track to have the longest lifespans in the world). We should be humble enough to remember that our collective and individual independence is never self-made – it is a gift built on the courage of allies, the sacrifice of strangers, and the willingness to work across boundaries for something bigger. Heck, we even got a huge gift from France that welcomes strangers every day with her beaconing flame. 

As a country, as a people, and as individuals, we only succeed when we are willing to embrace others into our cause, our time of need. That is the lesson Macharaviaya remembers with deep seriousness and honor. That our independence depends upon our interdependence. That is the truth we have forgotten.

I looked up at the banner, heard our respective national anthems played, the mayor of Galveston, Texas, speak, and gazed at the two flags snapping in the dry mountain wind. I thought: maybe we all need to come back to Macharaviaya. Not as tourists. As students.