Enrique's Writings

Lisa, a young Trinidadian immigrant living in Toronto, moved to Montreal with one clear intention: to learn French, a dream she had carried since childhood. Back in Charlotteville, in Tobago, she used to play with the children of Haitians working there. She had always thought the way they spoke to one another was beautiful, melodic. After, her family immigrated to Toronto, her connection to her French-speaking friends quietly faded away. After graduating from University of Toronto, Lisa decided to dedicate a year of her life to learning a second language. What better way than to immerse herself completely? She moved to Montreal, determined to live and work in a French-speaking environment. She relished her newfound independence as a university graduate. For the first time, she truly felt free, eager to explore her adopted country and embrace a new, official Canadian language. Montreal, one of Canada’s most vibrant bilingual cities, seemed perfectly suited to help her become the biling...

In Canada, Easter is celebrated, not commemorated. It’s a time of sweetness and joy, marked by hot cross buns and chocolate eggs, supposedly left behind by a cheerful rabbit. The origins of this celebration, however, reach far back, long before Christianity. In the Northern Hemisphere, Easter echoes ancient traditions linked to Ishtar, the Mesopotamian Akkadian goddess of love, fertility, and war, venerated as the “Queen of Heaven” and associated with the planet Venus. At its heart, Easter is about renewal, the awakening of spring, the return of life after a long, cold winter. In El Salvador, things were very different. We didn’t celebrate Easter; we commemorated Holy Week. It was a time devoted to the martyrdom of Christ: solemn, somber, and filled with silent reverence. There were long masses, slow processions, mournful chants, and a constant, almost suffocating sense of suffering and death in the air. As a child, I often spent Holy Week in Sonsonate. And yet, even with all that s...