Montreal is the fourth city we visited to conduct interviews for our virtual museum on migration stories of the Salvadoran-Canadian community. It is a unique place, as there we met Salvadorans who are bilingual in French and Spanish; unlike in most other parts of Canada, where English, not French, is the predominant language. The stories we recorded included accounts of refugee experiences from the years of the civil war in El Salvador. Coincidentally, the interviews took place at the YMCA building, which also hosts a shelter for newly arrived refugees in the city. It felt as though their presence there was a reminder of the importance of the stories we were documenting.
Two days of listening to stories of resilience, courage, and the many different journeys that led participants to their final destinations, places that, for some, were meant to be temporary shelters, while for others, represented a permanent new beginning.
We deeply admire the talent each participant has shown as a storyteller. It is not easy to make the decision to take part in a project like this, but we all agreed that it offers our community an opportunity to leave something meaningful for future generations and for Canadian society as a whole, a living testament that we came and made our home across this vast land called Canada.
During our conversations, we learned that the Comité Ciudadano Ccitizenship Committee) has collected materials over the past forty years, including promotional flyers, letters, photographs, and much more, many boxes filled with historical memory. Western University has generously offered to digitize this collection as a way to preserve and safeguard that legacy.
As always, we were fortunate to have an exceptional team from Western University assisting with the recording of the interviews. We are also deeply grateful to two members of the Montreal community from the Comité Ciudadano, Miguel Arévalo and Marta Viscarra, for helping us identify and select local participants and for providing a beautiful space in which to conduct the interviews.
