Coming home to Canada: Immigrant stories take centre stage

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Approximately one out of every eight people living in Saskatchewan today was born in another country, and later chose to call Canada their home.

But when Lautaro Reyes talks about immigration, the statistics aren’t the important part: It’s the stories that count.

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“We are people who want to communicate and tell our own stories,” said Reyes, who came to Canada from Chile about 12 years ago.

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“I think that one of the big problems in the world is a lack of empathy, but when you get to know other people and what they are going through, that is a good way to start.

“And next time when you hear ‘oh, there are so many immigrants in Saskatoon,’ you can think ‘well, this lady came from there’ and ‘this is the story of that person,’ and it becomes different. People start to understand, and I think that is enough.”

Reyes is in the process of creating and directing a new play that will highlight immigration stories, called Welcome to My Country.

Working with a group of Saskatoon-based actors, artists, creatives, storytellers and immigrants from all over the world, Reyes and his collaborators have spent the past year taking their own real-life stories and adapting them for the stage.

“This is a community project — not my show, but the show of everybody that is working on it,” said Reyes.

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“I am trying for this to be a bridge between what people feel and what they want to share; something where they can say ‘I am here. I feel free now. I can be queer and I am accepted from other people, and I am happy.’ Or maybe they feel like ‘Everything I was doing to come here was not right, because I have nothing here. I don’t feel like I deserve to be here because nothing is for me.’ It’s important that people know the person behind this label of ‘immigrant.’ ”

For Priscila Cabildo, working on the play has revealed common threads between her experience of coming to Canada from Mexico 14 years ago and those of other local creatives.

But each story is still unique.

“We have such different cultural backgrounds and traditions and ways of seeing life, but coming together and talking about these immigrant experiences in Canada, in Saskatchewan, we found a lot of related moments,” she said.

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“There are similar frustrations with the lack of opportunities; the struggle of having to show yourself, to demonstrate, to work double because you have to show that you are worth it — even though you have the same level of education or experience as any other Canadian.”

While some performers like Cabildo are making their long-awaited return to the theatre world here in Canada, others, like Krishnakumar Padmalayam, are making their debut.

“I was always interested in acting, so I thought ‘OK, this is an opportunity.’ And I joined the team,” he said.

“I told the story and Lautaro wrote the script, and when I read it, I’m thinking ‘Oh, these are all the things I’ve done? This is a good story! I didn’t even think about it like that.’ “

After the staged reading takes place at Persephone Theatre on June 28, Reyes says he and the team will continue to work on developing “Welcome to My Country” into a full show.Ohad Winkler, one of the actors involved, hopes there will be more chances for people to come and listen.

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“For me, it’s retelling the story of how I became more and more estranged to the culture I grew up in, and my values became further away from the predominant values in that society, until at some point it was just enough. And I had to pack my things and leave,” he said.

“In each of the other stories, there is at least one part that I can say ‘yeah, I know exactly what this is talking about. That’s exactly what I feel.’ We all share some of these feelings.

And I think, from the other side, is the understanding that everyone that’s here is here because at some point, we felt that we don’t exactly fit in our original society. That we needed to present, there, as something that we are not. So immigrating is part of looking for an opportunity to be ourselves.”

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