Donated documents offer snapshot of Chilean diaspora in Alberta

More than four decades after thousands of Chileans fled military dictatorship, the community's history in Alberta is set to be preserved in the Provincial Archives of Alberta.

A collection of records documenting the Chilean diaspora in Alberta was donated to the archives on Monday. The newspaper clippings, research files and other documents make up the largest donation of Spanish-language material to the archives.

"This archive is important for generations to come, to learn about what our first generations did to build a just society for human rights and social justice," said Sergio Olivares, president of Memoria Viva, thelocal Latin American community organization that collected and created the archive.

"If we stop telling our history, history will repeat itself," Olivares said on Monday during an event to mark the passing of the records from the community to the provincial archives.

The Chilean military staged a coup against President Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973, inaugurating a 17-year dictatorship that killed more than 3,000 people.

Sandra Azocar and her family fled Chile in 1975 after her father, a workers' rights campaigner, was freed from a concentration camp. They were among the more than 8,000 Chileans to seek refuge in Canada during the 1970s.

On Monday, a day ahead of the anniversary of the coup, she handed a stack of records to Ricardo Miranda, Minister of Culture and Tourism, after honouring her father and a history of social justice that followed the Chilean diaspora to Alberta.

"This is my dad's work and I'm very very happy to be able to share this with you and with Albertans," she told Miranda.

"It's a continuation of the work of the dreamers that actually dream with their feet firmly planted on the ground, because they knew that a society could be and must do better for its people."

Minister Miranda spoke about his own family on Monday, reflecting on their history as refugees from Nicaragua who fled the civil war and settled in Alberta in 1988.

The records, he said, provide an opportunity for the province to reflect on the trajectories of refugees in Canada.

"It'll be an example for everybody in this province to understand why people leave their homes and why people are here and their struggle," he said.

He expressed hope that the story of the Chilean diaspora would motivate people to, "participate in this work of human rights, to ensure that every single person has the right to freedom and expression and democracy."