Isabel Vincent reside em Toronto. É uma das mais prestigiadas jornalistas do Canadá.

Isabel Vincent was recently awarded Canada's prestigious Southam Fellowship and the Canadian Association of Journalists' Award for excellence in investigative journalism. Both awards are for her foreign reporting and her 1995 book See No Evil: The Strange Case of Christine Lamont and David Spencer, published by Reed Books (Canada).

She is currently on a leave of absence from the Toronto Globe and Mail, where she reported on ethnic issues across Canada. From 1991 to 1995, she worked as the newspaper's Latin America Bureau Chief, based in Rio de Janeiro. During that time she was a finalist for a National Newspaper Award (the Canadian equivalent of the Pulitzer) for her coverage of the drug wars in Rio de Janeiro's shantytowns in 1994. She also received an Inter-American Press Association Citation for her coverage of Peru's Shining Path guerillas in 1993.

In addition to her work for the Globe and Mail, she is also a regular contributor to London's Marie Claire. Her work as appeared in Canada's Saturday Night magazine, South Africa's Femina and the Spanish- and Portugese-language editions of Marie Claire.

See No Evil, an expose of Latin American terrorist groups, was recently optioned for a feature film by Canada's Salter Street Entertainment and Brazil's Altberg Productions.

Isabel Vincent lives in Toronto and is fluent in Spanish, French, Portuguese and Quechua (modern Inca).

Finding a Nationality That Fits

We started to become Canadian the day my mother got her first pair of pants.
         They wear gray-green gabardiné with a high waist, and came wrapped in tissue paper in an Eaton's box. My mother reluctantly modeled them for my brother and me, all the while declaring that she couldn't imagine ever feeling comfortable with the stretchy cloth hugging her hips. Portuguese women didn't wear pants, only the canadianas dared wear anything so revealing. But in the same breath she'd rationalize that she spent too much money not to wear them, and besides they'd probably be warm in winter.
        That was in 1975, a few years after my family had made the big break and moved from the poor immigrant enclave of Kensington Market to the more upscale neighborhoods of North York, where pockets of European immigrants were just beginning to emerge. We were pioneers in a way. My father had been among the first wave of Portuguese immigrants to Canada in the early fifties, working a bleak stretch of railroad near Port Arthur - now Thunder Bay, Ont. - to earn enough money for my mother's passage across the Atlantic. My mother arrived sea-sick in Halifax in 1955, and took a slow train to Toronto, where she joined my father in a roach-infested flat on Nassau Avenue in the market.
         My mother still speaks of those early sacrificios: living in a cold climate with cockroaches and mutely shopping for groceries, pointing out items to a local shopkeeper because she couldn't speak English. Her language skills were so tenuous that she once interpreted a greeting from an Orthodox Jew who lived in the neighborhood as an offer to buy my brother.
         In those days, Toronto police used to disperse small crowds of Portuguese men who lingered too long outside cafes. Despite a burgeoning group of immigrants, there were few Portuguese speakers, even in the market.
        But by 1975, the market became a Saturday-morning diversion for us, a place to shop for salted cod and fresh vegetables. To the hearty Portuguese immigrants who still worked in the factories and construction yards, and rented windowless basements in the market, we were on our way up. After all, there were very few Portuguese families north of Eglinton Avenue. Although we lived in a mostly Jewish and Italian neighborhood, we were finally becoming Canadian. Or so I thought.
         I learned English in my first year of school. Multiculturalism was just beginning and hyphenated Canadians were beginning to flourish. I played with Italian-Canadians, Lithuanian-Canadians and Chinese-Canadians, but at that time nobody - especially suburban 7-year - olds-seemed able to pronounce "Portuguese-Canadians," so I told people I was Greek; it was easier to say. My brother went even further, changing his name to something faintly Anglo-Saxon, so his teachers and classmates wouldn't get tongue-tied around those sloshy Portuguese vowels and embarrass him. It seemed a very practical idea at the time, and I reluctantly followed suit.
         But we still had problems, and didn't seem to belong. We never quite fit into the emerging Portuguese community, growing up around the parish of St. Mary's Church and the Toronto branch of the popular Benfica soccer club on Queen Street West. We were strangely aloof with our compatriots, most of whom had immigrated from the Azores, and whose guttural form of Portuguese we had difficulty understanding. My brother and I balked at heritage-language classes and remained passive spectators at the annual religious processions.

         But if we had trouble dealing with our peers in downtown Toronto, in North York we were not much better off. My mother and aunts spoke disparagingly of the canadianas, Canadian women who (they were sure) knew nothing about how to keep a clean house or cook a decent meal. My mother taught me how to cook and sew, and she and my aunts teased my brother, saying someday he'd marry a canadiana and would end up doing all his own housework.
         For all her predictions, my mother was delighted to find out that she had been wrong. My brother, a physician, did marry a Canadian, but he doesn't do much of the housework. These days, my mother's biggest problem is pronouncing the name of her new grandson, Mathew Loughlin Maclean Vincent.
         As I grew older I developed nostalgia for my Lusitanian past, and tried desperately to reintegrate into the community. But I soon grew to hate the hypocrisy of some of my compatriots, most of whom were immigrants who chose to spend several years working in Canada, only to retire to the Portuguese country-side and build their palatial retreats with the fat pensions they collected from the Canadian government. Like my father, who learned English quickly and severed ties with his homeland, I became a staunch Canadian. I could sing The Maple Leaf Forever before I was 10, and I spent my childhood years in French immersion. I became so good at masking my heritage that a few years ago when I applied for a job at a Toronto newspaper I was turned down because I was perceived as being too Anglo-Saxon.
         "If you were ethnic, I'm sure they would have hired you on the spot," the wife of the papers's managing editor told me a year later.
         But for most of my life being Portuguese seemed to me a liability. And then my mother bought that important first pair of pants. For a while it seemed that my life had changed. I was proud of my mother: she was becoming like all the other mothers in the neighborhood.
         But my excitement was short-lived. A few days later, she decided they just wouldn't do. She carefully wrapped them back up in the tissue paper, placed them in the cardboard Eaton's box, and returned them to the store.

Vincent, Isabel. "Finding a Nationality that fits." In Pens of Many Colours: A Canadian Reader, edited by Eva C. Karpinski and Ian Lea. Montreal: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Canada Inc., 1993. (First published in The Globe and Mail, 3 December 1990.)