Conversation with Anonymous

Title

Conversation with Anonymous

Description

Our Dominican-born interviewee moved to Ottawa, Canada, for higher education and family connections. Their sister's presence in Ottawa influenced their relocation, and over time, other family members likewise settled there, forming a strong support system. Despite living in separate homes, their family remains close-knit, frequently gathering for meals and celebrations. Cultural preservation is central to the interviewee's identity, with language playing a key role. Spanish is actively spoken at home, ensuring younger generations maintain fluency. Celebrations such as Christmas, birthdays, and Father's Day reinforce their heritage. Dominican holiday traditions, including festive gatherings, music, and food, are preserved within their family. Culinary traditions further connect the interviewee to their Dominican roots. They highlight "sancocho," a hearty stew, and "la bandera," a meal of rice, beans, and protein, as cultural staples. Access to Latin American ingredients in Ottawa supports their ability to cook traditional dishes. Overall, the interviewee underscores the challenges of cultural preservation while adapting to a new society. Their experiences provide insight into the immigrant experience in Ottawa, reflecting the importance of family, language, and tradition in maintaining cultural identity.

Date

2025-03-11

Format

MP3, 11 min 34 s

Language

English

Interviewer

Abigail Grant

Interviewee

Anonymous

Transcription

Interviewer: Hello everyone and a warm welcome to my interviewee, whose name will remain anonymous throughout our discussion. First, I want to say thank you for agreeing to be here today and, more specifically, for being a part of my study for my anthropology of Latin America and Caribbean class. My name is Abigail Grant, and this interview is part of a project with three main goals. First, to develop my skills in conducting ethnographic interviews. Second, to better understand the cultural vibrancy of Latin American and Caribbean communities in Ottawa. And third, to contribute to a Latin American and Caribbean Community Archive that can be publicly assessed and used as a tool for people to connect with and celebrate their cultural roots. With these goals in mind, your insights and experiences as someone from the area are crucial, extremely valuable, and appreciated, so thank you again for being here. Whenever you're ready, we can begin our journey and take a look at the questions that I have prepared for us today.
Interviewee: Absolutely. For sure.
Interviewer: Perfect.
Interviewee: It’s a pleasure being here.
Interviewer: We’ll just get into it then. So, number one, what is your country of origin?
Interviewee: I am originally from the Dominican Republic. I was born and raised over there.
Interviewer: Amazing. So, what brought you to Ottawa?
Interviewee: Well, initially it was the fact that I needed to go to school, but at the same time, what brought me to Ottawa, in specific, was my sister. My sister was living in Ottawa for about five years before I moved there. She married a Canadian guy, and so they had my nephews and everything. They originally moved to Montreal, but then after a few years they decided to base their family in Ottawa, until I joined them, when I was ready to go to school.
Interviewer: That’s awesome. That’s awesome. So, you do have family here, and do you see them frequently?
Interviewee: Yes. So, for the longest time we all lived together, and when I say all, I mean my sister and brother-in-law, and my two nephews, their two kids. But also, my older brother is currently in Ottawa as well, with his wife and my other nephew, who was also born in Ottawa. And then my Dad, his wife, and my younger brother are also living in Ottawa. So, at one point we were all living in the same house. And then, little by little, everyone, you know, my sister was able to buy a house, so was my brother, so they started moving out with their families. And we see each other once a week, sometimes even more, we’re always together.
Interviewer: That’s amazing. That’s awesome. So, okay, do you live in a Latin community or neighborhood where people speak Spanish and or Portuguese and celebrate various related occasions, or?
Interviewee: Not really. We do have some friends that we visit often to celebrate whatever occasion that there might be going on, but I don’t live in a Latin community.
Interviewer: Yeah.
Interviewee: Nobody speaks Spanish where I live or anything like that.
Interviewer: Awe. So, what celebrations are most important to you?
Interviewee: I would say anything that has to do with my family, so like birthdays or Father’s Day, Mother’s Day, things like that. Christmas is a big part of what we celebrate as well. Christmas is like a super huge deal in the Dominican.
Interviewer: Okay.
Interviewee: I would say those are the main ones.
Interviewer: Would you say it, like, differs? It is more, I don’t know. Do you find that you celebrate it more or have more emphasis on these things compared to [other] people who live here, or would you say it’s about the same?
Interviewee: I would say it’s about the same. Of course, there might be a few exceptions, but overall, in Latin America, people celebrate Christmas, it goes a long way.
Interviewer: Yeah. That’s interesting. Can you describe a typical day in your community?
Interviewee: Well, for my community I’m going to describe my family, because that’s the closest thing I know. A typical day would be, you know, waking up, taking the kids to school, going to work, and then we’ll have supper together at the end of the day. Breakfast is really not that traditional, but supper its usual we’ll have something very Dominican, very traditional.
Interviewer: That’s awesome. What would you... What’s a good meal that would have?
Interviewee: We have something called sancocho, which is like a stew with a lot of meat. It can be both beef and chicken, sometimes pork, all mixed in, with a lot of... My gosh, it has everything, it's like a huge soup, or like a stew, because it’s very thick. And you put plantains, yucca, things like that, in it. You can put corn. It’s like everything together, mixed in.
Interviewer: Nice!
Interviewee: We also eat a lot of rice.
Interviewer: Yeah.
Interviewee: That’s one that we mix in with everything as well. Yeah, that would be how we finish the day.
Interviewer: Good to know! Yeah. What are some values that you hold most dear as a member of the Latin/Carribean community?
Interviewee: I would say the fact that everything is very family oriented. Families are always your priority. You’re always thinking of ways to make your family members lives easier and how to, for example, as an example, I always think of... For example, if I’m renting a house, or if I’m getting a new job I always think of how close to my nephew’s school, for example, in case they need me. My first car that I got, it was just for me, so, you know, I could’ve gotten away with a smaller car, but because I know I have a big family I decided to get an SUV. Things like that. Like we’re always thinking about how the community, in my case my family, would need me.
Interviewer: Yeah.
Interviewee: And that is how each of us thinks of each other. Like, how we can help each other, how we can be close to each other, kind of thing.
Interviewer: That’s amazing. That’s so cute. I love that. So, I guess I asked you something similar, but how do you celebrate your heritage when you’re in Ottawa?
Interviewee: The main one would be the language for me. I think language has really shaped the way people see the world and how they express their feelings and things like that. So, we try to, as I said before my nephews were born in Canada, they were born in Ottawa, and for them to speak English, but we really try to force them to speak Spanish. It’s the language that we grew up speaking. Obviously, that’s the language I speak to my dad, for example. He barely speaks English. And that's the language I speak to my siblings. It’s just easier. That’s one of the things that I celebrate the most and how I embrace my culture because, as I said before, your language really shapes the way you see the world, in that sense. So that would be the main one.
Interviewer: That’s awesome. That’s amazing. What would you like to share about yourself or your community that you think is important for people to know?
Interviewee: I would say that a lot of people say Latins are loud, which is completely fair. But, it’s the fact that we’re very passionate about everything. So, if you’re going... If you see me and my siblings talking, for example, we can just be discussing what we’re making for dinner, and it sounds like we’re having this big argument and it’s really just how passionate we are about absolutely everything. As I said before, everything centers around your family. So, family comes first, everything else is last, or second, I shouldn’t say last. Yeah. And that’s something that a lot of people don’t really understand, but if they did, they would understand why we do what we do.
Interviewer: Yeah.
Interviewee: They would understand just more, yeah.
Interviewer: Yeah, that’s a good answer. Awesome. Thank you. What foods do you make that remind you of home and where do you purchase those groceries to prepare the traditional meals? Interviewee: That’s a great question. At my house, we... Everything that we eat is very very traditional. In the Dominican, at like for lunch, at lunch time, we usually have something called la bandera which is called the flag, the Dominican flag. I think that’s usually rice, some sort of protein, that’s usually chicken, but it can be beef, it can be pork, anything really. And then beans. We do, like a... But it’s not refried beans, it's just beans. The regular beans.
Interviewer: Yeah.
Interviewee: That’s what we would eat most days, almost every single day, and that’s across the entire Dominican Republic. So, that’s families from both lower and middle, and higher income. That’s what everyone does, like a variation of that. And whenever we get fancy, we do something like sancocho, which is the big stew that I mentioned before. It’s like a big soup. I’m trying to think of something else. Oh, in the Dominican we have this dessert that we usually eat around Holy Week. It’s called, gosh... sweet beans! It’s like beans, but you make them with milk and sugar. It sounds disgusting, but I promise it’s really really good. It’s really really tasty. It’s really good. And where we buy them... We usually don’t have trouble finding those, those things. Walmart is a really good place where we go. There’s FreshCo, they usually have [inaudible]. I was going to say Food 4 Less, but that’s not it. I can’t remember the name of that grocery store. It’s, like, green and the letters are yellow.
Interviewer: Oh... Foodland? No... I know what you’re talking about.
Interviewee: Its Food Basics.
Interviewer: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Okay. So, they have everything?
Interviewee: That’s it. That’s it. They pretty much have everything. Yeah. In the international aisle, they usually do have everything. And there’s a few stores here and there in Ottawa that are very... they are Latin. I can’t remember their names right now. But if you need something very specific from a different region, they might have it.
Interviewer: That’s good that we... that there are those stores though.
Interviewee: Yeah, we have no struggle whatsoever finding our stuff. In Ottawa.
Interviewer: That’s good.
Interviewee: In Ottawa.
Interviewer: Good. Yeah. Alright. So, the second last question I’ll ask you is, how likely would you and or your family be to use the website we are creating for uploading your stories? And how would you use it? [pause] and how would you use it? Yeah.
Interviewee: I would probably use it the most, with my nephews, I would say. So that they understand [pause] why we do what we do, and that they also see that other Latin families do something very similar. So that they know they belong somewhere. You know. They, they... We celebrate things and do things similar to other people that come from where we come from as well, so for them to feel part of a community and have that feeling of belonging. I would most likely use it with my nephews.
Interviewer: That’s amazing.
Interviewee: They need something like that.
Interviewer: Yeah. No, that’s amazing. At least, at least it would come into use in some way. That’s great.
Interviewee: Yeah!
Interviewer: Okay. So, the last thing is, do you have any other comments or concerns, like, anything you’d like to say at all? I know I’m putting you on the spot, but.
Interviewee: Yeah. Yeah. No, that’s great. Because it’s really interesting that there even is a course studying our culture. I think that’s really good for me as a Dominican, because I am both Latin and I live in the Caribbean, so I have both of those backgrounds. So, it’s really interesting that, you know, our cultures and heritage are being studied, and that you actually can learn about us. I think that’s great, so I’m really happy that you’re taking that course.
Interviewer: Thank you so much for doing this! I appreciate it so much. And we’ll talk... I’ll end the meeting now but thank you again.
Interviewee: Of course, no problem!

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