Life changed irrevocably for the Enriquez family after the military coup of I I September 1973. Belisario Enriquez was an English literature professor at the University of Chile. After the coup led by General Pinochet, pro-Allende friends and associates started disappearing, only to be found dead later. Belisario Enriquez, like many others, had been an active Allende supporter. The police went to the Enriquez home to look for him after the coup. By then Belisario had gone into hiding.
The family had good reason to believe that Belisario's life was in danger. Maria Angelica and her husband had both lost their jobs because of their political affiliations. She was working as an actress at the theatre at the University of Chile and had already been interrogated by the police. Maria Angelica and her children were questioned in their home during the night by the military and their house was ransacked. Their neighbour was picked up earlier by the police and never returned.
Knowing that if he was arrested he would suffer a similar fate, Belisario (with 50 other Chileans) sought asylum in the Canadian embassy in Santiago, The Chileans refused to leave. The Chileans' occupation of the embassy continued. The days stretched into weeks and weeks into months. Finally, the Canadian government sent a special ambassador to review the Chileans' cases in their embassy. A special Canadian Forces plane was sent to airlift the asylum seekers and their families to Canada.
The Enriquez family arrived in Canada on I I January 1974. Maria Angelica and her husband had three children: Gabriela (the oldest), Feman, and Claudio. Today, Claudio, an architecture student, lives at home. Feman is married with a second child on the way. Gabriela, also married, has a four-year-old daughter named Valentina, and was also pregnant at the time of the interview. When they arrived in Canada, Gabriela was 10 years old, Feman was eight, and Claudio was six. The violence they experienced in the wake of the military coup continues to haunt them, most especially Maria Angelica and her eldest child, Gabriela, who remembers so much of what she witnessed as a young girl.
In Chile, they were a middle-class family with a very stable economic status - a status that was virtually shattered with the death of Allende and the subsequent reign of terror. The change in their lives was a dramatic one. Fleeing for their lives, they were in Chile one day and in Canada the next. Canada was a country about which they knew nothing. Following relocation to Toronto, Belisario Enriquez helped other Chilean refugees because he was one of the few who spoke English. He was certain they would be returning to Chile and that their situation was only temporary.
Within less than two years of their arrival, Belisario was dead from leukemia. The task of keeping the family together and ensuring their financial support fell entirely to Maria Angelica, who knew no English. Maria Angelica held several jobs before she decided to go back to college and become a community worker. Now at the Centre for Spanish-Speaking Peoples, she helps other refugees and immigrants. Over the years, she has continued to be involved in the arts.
The children are now grown up. Fernan is a musician. Claudio is finishing his studies in architecture. Gabriela sells crafts from Chile. They have retained their mother tongue and all of them have been back to Chile several times. The Enriquez family lives in a co-op housing development in the heart of Toronto with about 40 other families, most of whom are Chileans who arrived as refugees.
