Conversation with Hakim Marquez.

Title

Conversation with Hakim Marquez.

Description

This interview features Hakim, a Venezuelan migrant living in Canada. Hakim spent the majority of his life in Venezuela, but Canada was not the first place he had lived abroad. In truth, Hakin was born in France and returned to Venezuela soon after. He later moved to Canada at the age of fifty-one, seeking opportunities in education and technology. Since then, he’s found success working at the University of Ottawa in Teaching Learning Support Services. Initially, Hakim's family had limited access to Latin American culture, let alone Venezuelan culture, and the Spanish language while living in Ottawa. However, they have been able to find a connection through an introduction to another Latin American family at their daughter’s school, and Hakim’s wife has since begun working at the Spanish Embassy. Beyond the social connections they have formed with other Latin Americans in Ottawa, Hakim and his family also prioritize maintaining their culture at home. He notes in the interview that social media has been one avenue that has helped them stay connected to Venezuela. Other ways they celebrate their family heritage are by making traditional foods, like Arepas, and by celebrating major Latin holidays. They listen to Latin music and dance, keeping their cultural heritage alive!

Date

Thursday, March 12th, 2026, 1:30 pm EST

Format

MP3, 20 MB.

Language

English

Interviewer

Haoming Xiao, Thomas Armstrong, Souleymane Camara.

Interviewee

Hakim Marquez.

Location

Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Transcription

Thomas Armstrong: Welcome everyone. Today we are joined by Hakim Marquez. Hakim is an educational development and digital learning specialist from the University of Ottawa, and we are very happy to have him participate in our interview today. So thank you very much for joining us today Hakim.

Haoming Xiao: Alright, so thank you for having the time to talk with us today. So, could you tell me about where you were born, and where your family is originally from?

Hakim Marquez: Okay, I was born in, actually, I was born in France. My mother is from France, and my father was Venezuelan. So they met in France, and when I was 3 years old, they went back to Venezuela, my father and my mother. And I lived in Venezuela all my life before coming here. Like, I was when I migrated here, I was 51 was when I came here, so I lived all my life in Venezuela.

Haoming Xiao: Yeah, alright, yeah, that's very nice. Yeah, so, what led you to come to Ottawa, and what was that move like for you?

Hakim Marquez: It was because I found this job working at the university. When I came here, when I came to Canada, I first lived with my sister back in Oakville. That's near Toronto. I don't know if you know the city. She actually bought a big, she was living in a house and she bought a bigger one with a walk-in basement for us to live with her while we were establishing ourselves. And during that first 3 years, I was working in whatever kind of jobs that I found at the moment. It was particularly jobs that required to be bilingual. Those are the easy ones. And the easy ones to find, I mean. It's more when you're coming to the country, if you are bilingual, you kind of have more chances to find a job, so I was working in that kind of jobs, but I was looking for something that was more close to what I was doing in Venezuela. I was a professor there in a university that my university was for teachers, they gave only teaching training for teachers. And I was looking for something at least related with education. I was always looking for like professor kind of jobs, and those are very difficult to find. And at some point, I thought, okay, let me try with because my other specialty was technology, and I said to myself, let me try combining the two things, like education and technology, and I immediately found like 3 different jobs in 3 different cities in Canada. And the best offer was this one, was Ottawa, and it was hard, because it was nice to live close by my sister. And here we knew no one, we didn't even know Ottawa, never been here before. And the change was it was a big change. We love Ottawa as a city. But it was colder, so we were, like, kind of, it was a whole process of getting used to the cold. When I was living with my sister, and then we came here, it was cold that we had to buy new things, new boots, new jackets, new sweaters to live here. But besides that, it was a nice change. We loved the city, we love the. My daughter was still little when we came. She was 7, so it's a city that is good for family to have family, and there's a lot of nature, there's a lot of, I love, like, kind of cultural things, I love to go to concerts and things, even those things which you have it close by, so it was a nice change.

Haoming Xiao: Alright, yeah, so you kind of answered our third question. So on to the next one. Do you spend time in any Latin American or Caribbean communities in Ottawa, for example, like places where you could speak Spanish or Portuguese, and celebrate your holidays?

Hakim Marquez: No, not actually, we don't. We don't. At the beginning, we didn't. The first year, we didn't even know no person that spoke Spanish at the beginning. And then after our first year, somebody from my daughter's school was from Latin America, and we started having a friendship. And we started, like, hanging out all the time together. But we don't go, like, to places where we can celebrate things, like go to events or things like that, we don't. Actually, I'm lying. My wife, but that started, like, the third year here. My wife started working for the Spanish embassy, Spain, the Embassy of Spain. And that's kind of our contact with the language. Because she works all the time there, and she has a lot of events that happen related with her work. And sometimes we meet people from the embassy, and so that's kind of what we do, but that's pretty recent, like, that started in our third year here.

Haoming Xiao: All right, so, what celebrations or holidays are the most important for you?

Hakim Marquez: In my country, maybe the most important one is Christmas. It is a big, big one. And also, New Year's. But our celebration is the day before. It's not, it's Christmas, in this case, it will be Christmas Eve, or New Year's Eve. The day before is a big celebration, and we try to start. You start at 7, and you try to get the party going after midnight. And for Christmas Eve, we cook, we, I don't know, we dance, we drink, we do a lot of things together, and we wait for midnight for the kids to open the gifts. We don't wait for the next year for the next day. We do that at midnight, and then we continue with the party. The kids start using their toys if they have anything to share, or to, they start playing with those, and the adults keep on the party. And with New Year's Eve, it's the same thing. We go, we start having, like, dinner together, we wait until midnight, celebrate the new year, and then we continue with the party. Sometimes it depends on the families. Sometimes you wait for New Year's, you wait until midnight, and then you go out with your friends. That depends on the families, but those are the two big, big, big celebrations. I don't think there is another holiday that is as important as those two.

Haoming Xiao: Alright, so, what does a typical day look like for you here in Ottawa? Either in your own life or in your community?

Hakim Marquez: Typical day is we start very early in the morning, we get up at 5:30, because we have to, in my case, I have to walk the dog. Very early in the morning, and my wife starts preparing breakfast and preparing the, we take our lunch, my wife, my daughter, and me, we take our lunch from home. We have this, for us, lunch is the most important meal in the day. We don't eat that much for dinner. The big one is lunch, so we take it from, we cook, like, sometimes on weekends, especially on weekends, we cook for all the week. And if we don't have all the meals, we, sometimes Monday or Tuesday, we finish the job. So, my wife stays at home while I'm walking the dog, she stays, like, warming my daughter's food, and putting hours, because we have microwaves, so we don't need to warm it. And then we have breakfast together, and we come. She goes to the embassy, I come here. I work all day long, I stop at noon to exercise, sometimes I go to the twice a week, I go to the pool. And then I finish my day, I take the train back home. Because my wife goes out to the office earlier than me, so I have to take the train back. The days I don't swim, I go to the gym close to home. When I get back, I walk my dog again. And then we have dinner, family, we are together for dinner. We try to stay together for dinner to, like, talk a little bit and see how the day went. And then we go to bed, like, early, because we get up early. And for weekends, I already told you part of it. We need to work for the meals, but we try always to visit Ottawa, or towns close to Ottawa, or maybe things we notice that, for example, this week, we noticed something in the papers, they were talking about some caves nearby, like, two hours using the car, and we try to do those kind of things when we know, oh, this is something, there is something nice to visit, we go and do that, or if we have the opportunity, we see our friends, or we repair things at home, my wife and I would love to do manual jobs at home. We like the handy jobs and we like that you save a lot of money doing those. So, if we have something to do, we do that on weekends. And that's mostly it.

Souleymane Camara: Okay, perfect. So, how do you stay connected to and celebrate your heritage while living in Ottawa?

Hakim Marquez: I think the main, main way we stay connected is we are very close to people we still have back home, like friends and family, and we connect with them on a regular basis using social media. We call each other. We're using WhatsApp or we send messages and we try to see what is happening. And for celebrations, we try, we do, especially we're very foodie people. We love food and we try to prepare dishes that are typical of our country. And we try to do that in normal days, but also for celebrations. And we try to share that with our friends. And maybe the main, main moment where we try to reproduce everything that we do that we did back home is on Christmas Eve and as I was telling you, those are the important festivities. So we have dishes and rituals that we try to reproduce, and sometimes it's not easy, but we try to do those on those celebrations. And we try to, I don't know, we keep track of what is happening with the news in the country. We read books about our country if we have the opportunity and, yeah, my wife, I don't have family back in Venezuela, but my wife has her mother, her sister. Everyone is there. So we talk with them like every day and we are always asking them what is happening. And we are in close contact with what is happening right now there. And we try to establish some connection between them and our daughter because she grew up here and we tried to interest her on what is happening there and talking to her about the country and the good things and also the bad things of what she has there. Sometimes we insist a lot on the good things because, due to the situation, sometimes she's scared. And when we tell her, "okay, next year we're going to visit the family," she's like a little bit scared, like, is that safe? So we try to, yeah, okay. There are risks, there are dangers, but you are going to enjoy this, enjoy that.

Souleymane Camara: Yes, you did. Thank you. And as someone who's connected to Latin America or Caribbean community, which values or ways of life feel most important to you?

Hakim Marquez: I think one of the values that I cherish more is a certain happy way of seeing life, you know, we try to concentrate on the good side of life. And we are very in that sense, we sing a lot, we dance a lot, and we try to have that every day. Like I didn't mention that before, but we hear Latin American and Korean music all the time, every day. And if we have the opportunity, my wife and I dance, and now it's not that difficult because you have in the gym, you have classes where you can dance, but if not, we do it at home and we are always singing, always. So this side of our culture that is very in contact with, I don't know about you guys, but for me, music is happiness, and I have this contact with music that puts me, it can be snowing, minus 30 degrees, and I am walking outside and I'm hearing some salsa and I'm singing. Sometimes I find myself, this is so weird, singing while the snow is falling, minus 30. And I imagine if people watch me, like singing and maybe I do a little step on the street, people must say, "this he lost it because it's snowing. There is no reason to be happy right now." But we have this, I think we have this part of a culture, like it's a way to not avoid sadness, but to be able to enjoy every little thing in your day, even when sad things are happening. It's not that you avoid thinking on that. Sometimes, even when you are thinking about that, you say, okay, no, I'm going to dance it or I'm going to sing it because I'm going to feel a little better if I do that. So I think that's the part I cherish more.

Souleymane Camara: Perfect, and is there anything about your community or you that you wish people in Ottawa had a better understanding or appreciated more?

Hakim Marquez: No, that's a good question. I haven't, I don't think I have this sensation that our culture is not appreciated by Ottawa, by our community. I think I have this feeling that we are, that Latin American culture is an important part of Canadian and Ottawa culture. People appreciate Latin American culture: food, music, even the language. I have met a lot of people learning Spanish because they love the language and want to go to Latin America. And so I don't have that regret, like something, "oh, I would love for people to see this," or, I think people here in Ottawa show interest in our culture and try to enjoy things about our culture.

Souleymane Camara: Perfect, and are there any particular foods or dishes that remind you of home? If so, where do you usually go in Ottawa to find the ingredients or a restaurant to eat these dishes?

Hakim Marquez: We love to cook, so we don't go that much to restaurants because to have meals as good as we cook ourselves, you have to pay a lot. So we don't do that that much. And we are lucky that we find a lot of our most important ingredients easily here. For example, our main dish, like the most important thing we eat, is arepas. I don't know if you know arepas. They are kind of a round bread, but it's made with corn flour. They are round and you can cut it in the middle and do kind of a sandwich with whatever you want. The most basic one is cheese, and then you can go from there and do whatever you want: put meat, put, if you are, for example, gluten-free or vegetarian, you have a perfect arepa because you can put pasta or gluten-free and beans inside, and you find, we combine arepas with everything, so you have a lot of ingredients you can use. The basic one I was telling you is with cheese; we love our arepa with white cheese. And we have a very special white cheese in our country made in very basic conditions. You don't find that here, but this Greek cheese, oh, I have a brain fart, we have here everywhere this Greek cheese that is hard and white that comes in, I don't remember the name right now. Sorry about that. But you find it everywhere, so it's pretty easy to make like our white cheese. And our culture has a lot of common elements with some African countries' culture. So, the fact that the two communities here are big and strong, you find everything like corn flour. Now you find in Walmart, for example, plantain, sweet plantains already cooked, a very important part of our meals. Some things you don't find, we love this fruit called papaya. I don't know if you know it. And it's not that easy to find. It's especially a summer fruit. Back in the country, you find it all year long. Here, it's more of a summer fruit. But those are a few exceptions of food that you cannot find here. I don't remember the original question, but I hope I answered it.

Souleymane Camara: I see. Yeah, perfect. Thank you so much. So we're creating a project website to share community stories, and we would like to know how you or your family would use a site like that. What would make it most useful or accessible for you, for example, the language or the content on the site? Or how would it need to be organised?

Hakim Marquez: It would be wonderful if you had the possibility of changing the language, but it's always nice to have your native language in the app and site. And if you can make it so we can see it on our phones nowadays, which is what we use the most, that would be wonderful too. And if you can share, like you were talking about, places where you can go and be more in contact with the community, if you can include that kind of thing, that's wonderful because that always helps. That is the way you'll say, okay, oh, let me try this, and let's see what happens. That will be very nice.

Souleymane Camara: So, last question, is there anything else you'd like to add, an experience, concerns or suggestions that we haven't talked about in this interview?

Hakim Marquez: No, not that I think of. I think your interview was very nice, very thoughtful.

Souleymane Camara: Perfect. Well, that was our last question. Thank you for your time.

Hakim Marquez: No problem, it was a pleasure, guys.

Souleymane Camara: We appreciate you taking the time to do this interview with us.

Hakim Marquez: It was a pleasure. I hope you have a good mark on your work, and that you have good results in all your courses with Laurie.

Original Format

On Zoom

Duration

28:00 min.