Martin Boyd

Throughout the Spanish-speaking world and in Mexico in particular, Cantinflas is, beyond all doubt, a cultural icon. With Cantinflas, the Mexican comedian Mario Moreno created a character who featured in more than 50 feature films and became an emblematic image of Mexico’s national identity: the archetypal “pelado”, obtuse, at times insane but always hilarious, with a strong dose of social satire.

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Martin Boyd

On September 15, Mexicans all over the world will be celebrating the independence of their native land once again. Both in towns all over Mexico and in Toronto and other cities of the world where there is a significant Mexican population, Mexicans come out to the public squares every year to commemorate the night in 1810 when the priest Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla called upon the parishioners of the town of Dolores, in the state of Guanajuato, to take up arms against the Spanish. This celebration is so firmly ingrained in the national collective imagination that sometimes its most basic features are obscured or forgotten.

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Martin Boyd

Since the 1970s, Canada’s Hispanic community has grown from a tiny group of pioneering Spanish and Latin American immigrants to a vibrant, multifarious community of well over half a million. A key factor in the development of this community, which today has become such a vital element of Canada’s multicultural mosaic, has been Canada’s positive approach to immigration, and in particular, its historically compassionate refugee policy. Indeed, a significant proportion of the first major waves of Hispanic immigrants to Canada were refugee claimants from the military dictatorships of Chile, Argentina and Uruguay in the 1970s, and from war-torn El Salvador in the 1980s, who played an important role in building and consolidating an infrastructure for Hispanic arts and culture in this country, and whose positive contribution to their adopted home has added a very welcome dimension to Canada’s cultural fabric.

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Martin Boyd

Chavela Vargas, the Mexican singer with an incomparable voice that seems to embody the spirit of melancholy itself, left us last year after a music career spanning more than 60 years that turned her into one of the most important figures of contemporary Mexican culture and the true incarnation of “La Llorona” (“the Weeping Woman”), the song that became her signature tune.

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Martin Boyd

People often ask me about the “Intercultural” in the name of my company, Diálogos Intercultural Services. What does it mean exactly?

The short answer is that it refers euphemistically to translation. I am a translator and Diálogos is a translation company, and the services we provide are “intercultural” in the sense that they foster the communication of ideas and information between cultures. But on a deeper level, the concept of “interculturalism” effectively underpins my philosophy of translation and why I believe it is important, as it is through the intercultural communication facilitated by translation that people in different cultural contexts can come to understand, appreciate and learn from one another. Translation opens up the possibility of intercultural dialogues (hence the other component in the name of the company, Diálogos) that are mutually enriching for both cultures. And, I believe, it is only through such engagement with other cultures that we can ever hope to even begin to develop a more complete understanding of what it means to be human.

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Paulina Derbez

In 2005, my husband and I took the decision to move from Mexico City to Toronto, Canada. The motivation behind our move was both professional and personal, as my husband had lived a part of his childhood in Toronto, and I had previously had the opportunity to perform in one of Toronto’s major festivals. It was not an easy decision to make, but I personally felt a strong impulse to make a big change. And indeed, it was a big change; much bigger than we had expected.

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Martin Boyd

Canada is often applauded as the first country in the world to adopt “multiculturalism” as a political imperative. As early as the 1970s, the concept of a multicultural nation was central to Pierre Trudeau’s vision of the “Just Society”. Yet most of the Trudeau government’s concrete achievements to foster multiculturalism stopped short at protecting the rights of Canada’s French-speaking minority, and, thirty years later, Canada still seems to be struggling to expand its national identity beyond the narrow scope of English-French bilingualism to become truly multicultural. The most obvious example of Canada’s myopic vision of multiculturalism lies in the Canadian tendency to assume “bilingual education” means instruction in English and French, as if these were the only two languages that exist in the country. Indeed, while the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms includes two clauses under the misleading heading “Minority Language Educational Rights”, the clauses themselves speak only of the rights to receive an education in Canada’s two official languages, with no rights accorded to the millions of speakers of Cantonese, Mandarin, Italian, Polish, Korean, Ukrainian, Hindi, Portuguese or Spanish who have made Canada their home – or, for that matter, speakers of Canada’s many indigenous languages.

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