Martin Boyd
“They [Mexicans] are bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” – Donald Trump, candidacy speech, June 16,2015
It would be fair to say that in recent years, US-Mexican relations have hit one of their lowest points in living memory. With his promise to build a wall spanning the US-Mexican border, the current US president made hostility towards Mexico a pillar of his campaign for the White House in 2016, a hostility that proved fundamental to his baffling success. The bizarre tribal chant “Build that Wall!” shouted by thousands of supporters of Donald Trump at his incendiary campaign rallies, has gone hand-in-hand with his campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” in the collective imagination of the trumpistas, for whom the exclusion and denigration of their neighbours to the south is inextricably tied to what they view as their own nation’s mission to recapture its “manifest destiny” as the world’s greatest superpower. The border wall has become the Trump nation’s most tangible symbol, a concrete manifestation of an almost pathological need to abuse and reject Mexico in order to assert American greatness.
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.
Conference, seminar and concert
It was the most oft-repeated comment in the hours after Fidel Castro’s death that he was probably Canada’s favourite dictator. Canadians certainly never approved of the methods used by Fidel Castro to govern Cuba; press censorship and political repression, his insistence that the unions be managed by the government, and the arbitrary practices of his revolutionary courts would never have been welcomed in a democratic and diverse country like Canada.
When: Saturday, November 5, 2016 
On September 25, 2006, the company Diálogos was born. I founded the business just two months after arriving in Toronto from Mexico City, with the primary purpose of providing Spanish-English translation services, but also with a broader vision of offering a forum of intercultural exchange between the Spanish- and English-speaking worlds in Canada. Over the past decade, Diálogos has evolved into a premium agency providing translation services in the legal, literary, academic and commercial fields, serving clients here in Canada and all over the world. At the same time, our broader vision of supporting exchange between Hispanic and Anglophone communities in Canada has been realized through a wide range of initiatives.
